AN AMERICAN UTOPIA Dual Power and the Universal Army FREDRIC

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AN AMERICAN UTOPIA Dual Power and the Universal Army

FREDRIC JAMESON - Edited by Slavoj Zižek

AN AMERICAN UTOPIA

Dual Power and the Universal Army

FREDRIC JAMESON, JODI DEAN, SAROJ GIRl, AGON HAMZA, KOJIN KARATANI, KIM STANLEY ROBINSON, FRANK RUDA, ALBERTO TOSCANO, KATHI WEEKS

EDITED BY SLAVOJ ZIZEK

Y VERSO

London • New York First published by Verso 2016 The collection© Verso 2016 The contributions© the contributors 2016

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ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-453-9 (PBK) ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-452-2 (HBK) ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-454-6 (US EBK) ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-451-5 (UK EBK)

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Typeset in Fournier by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh Printed in the US by Maple Press Contents

Foreword: The Need to Censor Our Dreams Slavoj Zi{ek- vii

I. An American Utopia Fredric jameson- I 2. Mutt and JeffPush the Button Kim Stanley Robinson- 97 3. Dual Power Redux Jodi Dean- IO) 4· The Happy Accident of a Utopia Saroj Giri- I33 5· From the Other Scene to the Other State: Jameson's Dialectic of Dual Power Agon Hamza - I4 7 6. A Japanese Utopia Kojin Karatani- I69 vi CONTENTS

7· Jameson and Method: On Comic Utopianism Frank Ruda- 183 8. After October, Before February: Figures of Dual Power Alberto To scano - 21 1 9· Utopian Therapy: Work, N onwork, and the Political Imagination

Kathi We eks - 24 3 10. The Seeds of Imagination Slavoj Zi[ek- 267

An America Utopia: Epilogue Fredric Jameson- 309

Index- 329 Foreword: The Need to Censor Our Dreams

Slavoj Zitek

Fredric Jameson's An American Utopia radically questions standard leftist notions of an emancipated society, advocating among other things-universal conscription as the model fo r the communist reorganization of society, fully acknowledging envy and resentment as the central problem of a communist society, and rejecting dreams of overcoming the division between work and pleasure. Endorsing the axiom that to change society one should begin by changing one 's dreams about an emancipated society, Jameson's text is ideally placed to trigger a debate on possible and imaginable alternatives to global capitalism. This volume brings together Jameson's pathbreaking text, especially revised fo r this edition, with an original short story by Kim Stanley Robinson that plays upon some of Jameson's motifs, philosophers' and political and cultural analysts' reactions to Jameson, and Jameson's short epilogue. Although the reactions are often critical toward Jameson, they all agree on the need to radically rethink the leftist project. viii SLAVOJ :ZI:ZEK

Many leftists (and especially "leftists") will definitely be appalled at what they encounter in this volume-there will be blood, to quote the title of a well-known film. But what if one has to spill such (ideological) blood to give the left another chance? 1

An American Utopia

Fredric Jameson

We have seen a marked diminution in the production of new utopias over the last decades (along with an overwhelming increase in all manner of conceivable dystopias, most of which look monot onously alike). Can these developments be dated or periodized in some way? I have always been tempted to mark the end of utopian production with Ernest Callenbach's great Ecotopia of 1975, a work whose most serious flaw, from today's standpoint, is the absence of electronic or informational technology. Maybe the utopian fo rm, then, cannot integrate such technology, or maybe on the other hand the Internet itself has soaked up many of the available utopian fantasy impulses. Or was it the triumph of Reagan-Thatcher financialder egulation in the late 1970s and early 1980s that spelled the end of utopian thinking, at the same time that it seemed to seal the victory of late capitalism over all imaginable, let alone practicable, alternatives? In fact, the possibilities for utopian thinking were always bound up with the fo rtunes of a more general concern, not to say 2 FREDRIC JAM ESON

obsession, with power. The meditation on power was itself an ambiguous project. In the 1960s this project was a utopian one: it was a question of thinking and reimagining societies without power, particularly in the form of societies before power: here Levi-Strauss's revival of Rousseau gave rise to the utopian visions of early Baudrillard, of Marshall Sahlins in his Stone Age Economics, of Pierre Clastres, and of that supreme utopian vision, The Forest People by Colin Turnbull. Yet at a certain point the inquiry into societies without power begins to turn into an inquiry into the emergence of power in early human societies; this theoretical problem slowly links up with practical politics, in the form of an anti-institutional and anarchist preponderance on the left whose causes are clearly multiple. They range from the failure of May '68 and the disillusionment with the old Communist Parties to the disillusionment with African decol onization, not to speak of the sorry fate of Third Wo rldism and of the triumphant wars of national liberation, from Algeria to Vietnam. At some such general point the reflection on power acquires its ideological foundations in the work of Michel Foucault and others, reinforced by "revelations" about the gulag, and becomes a dystopian obsession, a quasi-paranoid fear of any form of political or social organization-whether in the formation of political parties of one kind or another or in speculation about the construction of future societies radically differentfr om this one as well as a desperate brandishing of the terminologies of freedom and democracy by leftists, who ought to know better and to appre ciate the quasi-ownership of this language by Western "democra cies" or, in other words, by late capitalism. At any rate, these developments in the field of utopias seemed to go hand in hand with the virtual dissolution of practical politics of all kinds on the left. This is the situation in which I want to propose a project about which I can't be sure whether I am proposing a political program or a utopian vision, neither of which, according to me, ought to be possible any longer. AN AM ERICAN UTO PIA 3

Why not? Well, the left once had a political program called revolution. No one seems to believe in it any longer, partly because the agency supposed to bring it about has disappeared, partly because the system it was supposed to replace has become too omnipresent to begin to imagine replacing it, and partly because the very language associated with revolution has become as old fashioned and archaic as that of the Founding Fathers. It is easier, someone once said, to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism: and with that the idea of a revolution overthrowing capitalism seems to have vanished. Well, let's be fair: the left did have another political strategy, whatever you think about it, and that was reformism-sometimes, in contradistinction to revolu tionary communism, called "socialism." But I'm afraid no one believes in that any longer either. The reformist or social-democratic parties are in a complete shambles: they have no programs of any distinction, save perhaps to regulate capitalism so it does no really catastrophic or irrepara ble damage. There is omnipresent corruption both in these parties and in the system at large, which is, in any case, too enormous and too complex to be susceptible to any decisive tinkerings which might improve it, let alone lead to something you could truly call systemic change. Social democracy is in our time irretrievably bankrupt, and communism seems dead. Thus, it would seem, neither of Gramsci's celebrated alternatives-the war of maneu ver and the war of position-seem any longer theoretically or practically adequate to the present situation. Fortunately, there exists a third kind of transition out of capital ism which is less often acknowledged, let alone discussed, and that is what was historically called "dual power." Indeed, dual power will be my political program and will lead to my utopian proposal.1

I am grateful to Alberto Toscano and Sebastian Budgen fo r indispensi ble guidance in researching this theme. 4 FREDRIC JAM ESON

The phrase is, of course, associated with Lenin and his descrip tion of the coexistence of the provisional government and the network of soviets, or workers' and soldiers' councils, in 1917-a genuine transitional period if there ever was one-but it has also existed in numerous other fo rms of interest to us today. I would most notably single out the way organizations like the Black Panthers yesterday or Hamas today fu nction to provide daily services-food kitchens, garbage collection, health care, water inspection, and the like-in areas neglected by some official central government. (If you like current Foucauldian jargon, you might describe this as a tension or even an opposition between "sover eignty" and "governmentality.") In such situations, power moves to the networks to which people turn fo r practical help and leader ship on a daily basis: in effect, they become an alternate govern ment, without officially challenging the ostensibly legal structure. The point at which a confrontation and a transfer take place, at which the official government begins to "wither away," a point at which revolutionary violence appears, will of course vary with the overall political and cultural context itself. It is not necessary to supply a historical catalogue of these anomalous structures of transitional coexistence, which range fr om the dualities of church and state in some periods to that of local communes in the French Revolution (most notably, the first Commune de Paris that supported Danton's still informal power). It might be more useful to indicate the kinds of events or structures that cannot be considered relevant examples of dual power: enclaves, fo r example, such as Chiapas or Ecotopia, or the free zones of the maroons, which are spatially separate fr om the domi nant state and have their own geographical autonomy. I would also suggest that the current fo rm of the mass uprising, fr om the Arab Spring to Occupy, does not really qualify either. The firstof these two revolutionary phenomena-the enclave-stands as a kind of state within a state; the second-the uprising-as a spatial event that pioneers information technology as a substitute fo r political AN AM ERICAN UTOPIA 5 organization. (This is not to discount the survival of this or that local armed uprising or guerrilla struggle-this terrain has mostly been reoccupied by militant Islam, which has filledthe void left by the mass destruction of radical or revolutionary, secular move ments in the former Third World.) As fo r the older political parties, the so-called progressive ones such as the Democrats or the various European social democracies, nothing much is to be hoped fo r fr om them-at best a holding operation and at worst the pursuit of capitalist ends by other means, such as NAFTA and all kinds of new international arrangements whose ultimate goal and effect lies in the "improvement" of free trade and its construction of new monopolies and the perpetuation of the so-called free market. In that sense, representative democ racy is irreparably corrupt and incapable of fu lfilling its promises (or "rising to the level of its concept," as Hegel might say); and the left parties always capitulate whenever they come to power. This is not to say, however, that they have no fu nction whatso ever. Indeed, in the heady days of a kind of utopian anthropology, the ethnologists of pre-power societies explained that in such tribes there already existed chiefs and leaders, but that in the absence of the bodyguards, retinues and priesthoods they would acquire later on after the state had come into being, their role was quite different and probably now unimaginable to us, except in the dynamics of small groups and sects. For in those early times chiefs had but one function, namely to talk, to talk and talk, upon which their alleged subjects simply guffawed or consulted among themselves. The chief was a powerless figure with a purely ritualistic fu nction, to take the floor,to hold fo rth, to secure the event of the group meet ing; and no more, and certainly not the function of the dictatorial, charismatic orator or the secret and ominous source of orders and sentences. 2

2 On this function of the chief, see Pierre Clastres, La Societe contre !'.Etat, Paris: Minuit, 1974, especially Chapter 2. 6 FREDRIC JAM ESON

Such might be the role ofour parties, but with a useful twist and in a very different situation. I believe that it was Stuart Hall who originated the luminous phrase "discursive struggle" (and this is the moment to pay tribute to his memory and his extraordinary theoretical and pedagogical achievements). Discursive struggle a phrase that originated in the defeat of the Thatcher years and the interrogations around that victory-discursive struggle posited the process whereby slogans, concepts, stereotypes, and accepted wisdoms did battle among each other for preponderance, which is to say, in the quaint language of that day and age, hegemony. Stuart saw that one of the fu ndamental strategies at work in that victory lay in the deligitimation of the language of its adversaries, in the tireless discrediting of all the slogans, such as nationalization, that were associated with a postwar labor hegemony. And this is a process which is at least relatively distinct fr om either ideology or propaganda; it is one which deprives the political enemy of its conceptual weapons and at one stroke ages its programs and turns them boring and old-fashioned, unmodern, overused and over familiar, a thing of the past. The proof is that free-market rhetoric (and that of the "modern") has become omnipresent-that virtu ally everyone believes, as Mrs. Thatcher did, that there is no alter native-indeed, that there are many people today, perhaps a majority, who believe that the free market actually exists, besides being eternal. This is then the situation in which the old social-democratic and liberal parties may still be said to have a fu nction: they can serve as vehicles and platforms fo r some renewed public legitima tion of hitherto repressed and stigmatized transformational poli cies. It was some such fu nction, fo r example, that the plays of George Bernard Shaw (along with Bertolt Brecht, one of the few great political playwrights of modern times) fu lfilledin the British interwar period, a hidebound reactionary and aristocratic period if there ever was one, fo r Shaw cunningly inserted into all his drawing-room comedies a secondary character, a socialist AN AMERICAN UTO PIA 7

chauffeur or fo otman, who by exercising properly left discourse gradually respectabilized it fo r the fearful upper classes and made its postwar triumph less terrifying. So today it would be incum bent on our otherwise impotent social-democratic parties to "talk socialism" and to breathe life back into the slogans withered and desiccated by the triumphant poison gas of Mrs. Thatcher's breath. (Bernie Sanders, indeed, seems today to have begun to assume such a function.) This is of course a matter of collective rather than individual rhetoric, with its own intricacies and technological and collective novelties; nor is this the place to explore them. But surely the most important achievement of any such exercise in discursive struggle is the rehabilitation of nationalization, and behind that, the replace ment of the universally detested target of "big government" with the more stirring realities of collective commitment. It is the reha bilitation as well of that even more viscerally repugnant social entity called "bureaucracy," by way of a historical reminder of the glorious roles that social stratum has played in the great literacy campaigns, in the struggles for unionization, in the commitment of teachers to the displacement of superstition-ridden clerical schools in the France of the early Third Republic, or the self-sacrifice of socialist doctors in the firstdays of the national health services in Britain and in Canada-in short, some welcome renewal of an acknowledgement of the altruistic fervor and sacrifice such as we witness historically in the movements of social workers through the ages. As for the themes to be floated and relegitimized in this way, surely none is more actual than the nationalization of finance, of banks and insurance companies and investment institutions of all kinds; even though, more recently, what has come to seem more immediately urgent, particularly in the era of climate change now upon us, is the wholesale seizure of all energy sources, the appro priation of the oil wells and the coal mines and the destitution of the immense transnational companies that control them. This is 8 FREDRIC JAMESON not to neglect the other urgent issues confronting people on a daily basis: the need fo r draconian taxation of the great corporations, if not their outright appropriation; the gradual redistribution of wealth, not excluding the eventual abolition of inheritance as such; the establishment of a guaranteed annual minimum wage; the dissolution of NATO; popular control of the media and the prohi bition of the most noxious right-wing propaganda; universal wi-fi; the abolition of tuition and the reconstruction of free and universal public education, including substantial reinvestment in teachers' salaries; fr ee health care; full employment; and so on and so fo rth, in no particular order. Besides these substantive policies, which the political parties might well wish artificiallyto endorse, thereby educating a public otherwise carefully screened fr om them by media self-censorship, there is a whole politics of words and terms implicit in the Thatcherite "discursive struggle." This presents another promis ing, if related, terrain of struggle: the word "austerity," for exam ple, harbors within itself a whole neoconservative economic theory as well as a concentrated verbal slogan and target fo r political demonstration. In a more positive direction, meanwhile, the word "debt," as it was dramatized by the Occupy movement, suddenly crystallized a whole new theoretical perspective on capitalism as well as a practical-political program of a positive and substantive nature; indeed, "debt" quickly became an "empty signifier" capa ble of mobilizing a number of distinct political strategies at one and the same time. It should be understood that under the current system of representative government, the political parties can never accomplish any of these things, but they can talk about them, they can make them thinkable and conceivable once again, they can plant the seeds and rekindle the possibility of imagining future praxis-and they can reestablish these themes in their legitimate place in the public sphere. AN AME RICAN UTOPIA 9

As for the realization of such monumental changes, that can only be the task of dual power as such; and it is now time to examine our society as it is today in order to weigh the chances fo r dual power and to identify those already existing institutions which could be its vehicle. Traditionally, of course, it is to labor unions which the left has always turned to as its base and its natural constituency: the very nature of the proletariat has been transformed and enlarged by the transformation of peasants into farmworkers, by underpaid service industries, and by the white-collar workers in a now immense government bureaucracy. On the other hand, as everyone knows, the original industrial character of work has itself been reduced by information technology and the power of the unions greatly diminished; traditionally, in any case, there was always a tension between the unions and the political parties, which had differentaims. Nor must we underestimate the success of anti union propaganda during the dissolution of the New Deal, that is, for the whole of the Cold War, by way of alleged association with the Mafia, with corruption, and with the stigma of identificationas a "special interest," as we call lobbying groups in this country. The defeat in Wisconsin, after one of the most encouraging political developments in recent years, is sad proof that this kind of anti union prejudice persists unabated. Unions no longer offeran effec tive chance at dual power, if they ever did. But even a renewed unionization movement faces new and major structural challenges in the postmodern era. For one thing, everyone assures us that in the new era there will be no such thing as stable employment in a single line of work, let alone a single enterprise-assuming there is any employment at all. In fact, we are entering an age of massive structural unemployment, in which the fundamental organizational problem is no longer that of unify ing workers assembled in a single locality and sharing concerns about a clearly defined work process but rather organizing the 10 FREDRIC JAMESON unemployed, who not only do not share a workplace or shop floor but may not even have semi-permanent housing. They do not share routines or priorities, they do not even communicate with each other, and no particular signal can assemble them in meet ings; at best they are unifiedby soup kitchens and flophouses, and not even the same ones from night to night. The second problem is that the predominant mode of employ ment in this new era of unemployment is that of what has been called the "gray market" : not illegal work in the sense of criminal ity, drug smuggling and distribution and the like, but rather ad hoc work fr om job to job and from place to place, on the order of mobile fo od trucks or informal car repair fr om neighborhood to neighborhood out of your own pickup. Small business now trends in this direction; if it is not altogether absorbed into those larger monopolistic networks into which dry-cleaning establishments and fast-food restaurants (for example) are fo rced, then it shrinks in the other direction into individual services, which face a differ ent kind of monopolization, as we shall see in a moment. At any rate, it is clear that the transformation of small business (already immune to unionization) into such individualistic service provi sion makes for a population for whom union organization can only mean something political, not a fu ndamentally economic form of self-protection and collectivity. Maybe we should conclude that in this society it is in fact the Mafiawhich offers the most suggestive example of already existing dual power; however, its effectiveness in a national context seems to have waned as significantly as that of the unions themselves. Indeed, books like Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah suggest that as a business, the Mafia itself (using the term now in a generic sense) has been transformed by globalization and, unlike the unions, has taken on many of the features of a transnational institution. This might suggest a model fo r world government (we might relate it to paranoid fantasies of that omnipotent UN readying its black heli copters to destroy local American institutions), but it means that in AN AM ERICAN UTOPIA 11 the national context, the local power of crime has been as seriously weakened in its effectiveness as the unions themselves. Perhaps the emergence of gangs and the drug trade is a symp tom and a compensation fo r this institutional weakness. Thus the globalization of crime leaves a local void into which different kinds of small-scale collectives flow: a void filled by gangs and groupus cules organized along neo-ethnic and identity-political lines, and suggesting a more general pattern of development: a dialectic whereby the well-known "weakening" of the nation-state gives rise to a new reorganization of binary oppositions and a new set of coordinated but polar developments. Global and local: this idiotic fo rmula, which has known extraor dinary and indeed worldwide success in fu rnishing a brand-new stereotype fo r new yet still incomprehensible developments, is little more than a caricature of a dialectic of space acted out on all conceivable levels of postmodernity, from the economic and the social all the way to culture and individual existence. On all these dimensions, entities (seemingly of an institutional kind) which are somehow "larger than life" and thus unrepresentable in the fo rm of individual existence move fu rther and fu rther away fr om a micro-level of human experience, in which everything seems to have been reduced to a present of time without a temporal context. The "global" becomes unimaginable, while the "local" becomes unthinkable and accessible only to bodily sensation and experi ence. It is a reorganization of oppositions which has left its after image on the historically sensitive philosophical template in the fo rm of a seemingly new, yet also very old, struggle between universals and what are no longer particulars but rather singulari ties. The category of individuality, which was once a kind of Hegelian "synthesis" between universality and particularity, has dissolved altogether, and one finds oneself confronting a complex of terms or semes in which, characteristically, the fourth position remains enigmatic and unfilled, mysterious, the object of conjec ture and philosophical speculation: 12 FREDRIC JAMESON

UNIVERSAL PARTICULAR

X SINGULAR

I would propose, but only provisionally, that the empty slot that might stand at one and the same time for the nonparticular and the antisingular be penciled in as sheer standardization, the produc tion of entities of equal value (in the Marxian sense) that have no longer anything distinctive or particular about them, but which also cannot count as unique in the sense of singularities. They are thus grotesque shadows of universalities that no longer function to organize anything but which are equally inaccessible to either reason or sense alike: both tasteless and unthinkable all at once. The new standardization, which can still be thought of, if one likes, in terms of Marx's analysis of commodities, also reminds us of Cartesian extension, a kind of underlying substance which is neither Kantian Ding an sich nor a Spinozan attribute but which, unlike the formless concept of "matter," is historical in its essence and existence. It is the identity of difference, foretold by Hegel's Logic and replayed in all its possible combinations by Derrida's tireless mental exercises, whose only flaw was the omission of prophecy-for standardization was something that deserved to be prophesied historically and then reconfirmed, apres coup, as a prophecy which came true. We will call it space, and thereby complete the diagnosis of the supersession of time by space in a description of postmodernity which was also meant to be a historical and political diagnosis. It is a development which can now be dramatized politically, for I want to suggest that it is strikingly confirmed by the evolution of politics itself, whose extraordinary verities throughout history seem today, on the global scale, to have been themselves reduced and standardized on a well-nigh global scale. I will put a very AN AMERICAN UTOPIA 13 simple proposition to you: namely that today, all politics is about real estate. Postmodern politics is essentially a matter of land grabs, on a local as well as a global scale. Whether you think of the question of Palestine, the settlements and the camps, or of the politics of raw materials and extraction; whether you think of ecology (and the rainforests) or the problems of federalism, citi zenship, and immigration, or whether it is a question of gentrifi cation in the great cities as well as in the bidonYilles, the fa Yelas and the townships and of course the movement of the landless today everything is about land. In Marxist terms, all these strug gles result from the commodification of land, the dissolution of the last remnants of feudalism and its peasantries, and their replacement by industrial agriculture or agribusiness and farmworkers. Where is time in all this? It is to be fo und in the new flashcrowds enabled by cell phones and texting: the new mass demonstrations of Seattle and of Eastern Europe, ofTahrir Square and of Wisconsin and of Occupy. These truly mark the emergence of what my friends Michael Hardt and Toni Negri call "multitude"; they are no longer the politics of duration but the politics of the instant, of the present, what Negri himself has called constituent power, as opposed to the constituted kind. Postmodernity in general is char acterized by this new kind of present of time, a reduction to the body. In this new dialectic of omnipresent space and the living or temporal present, history, historicity, the sense of history, is the loser: the past is gone, we can no longer imagine the fu ture. We will return to space shortly in a different context; but it is clear enough that this waning of history, of historicity or historical consciousness, confronts those of us still committed to radical systemic change with some very real political problems, and in particular with the obligation to think revolution in a new way, one here conceptualized as dual power. 14 FREDRIC JAMESON

We have thus been led to a search fo r institutions within the already existing state capable of producing or at least making possible and conceivable a situation of dual power. And we have unexpectedly arrived at the possibility of fo rmulating some historically new preconditions required for such an eventuality. Obviously, it has been clear that the need fo r a revolutionary concept of dual power to fill in the gaps left by the disappearance of the older twin Gramscian concepts of revolution had everything to do not just with the end of the Cold War but above all with that globalization which spelled an end to the way global class struggle had hitherto been waged-both in its political-practical and its ideological forms. So fr om the outset we might well have formulated our quest in this way: What fo rm can a situation of dual power take in the new world of globalization-of the communicationalization of capital, the globalization of finance capital and of a new kind of extractive neo-imperialism, of a post-national world fitfully controlled by a capitalist hegemon? But now we may add yet another fe ature, fo r we have fo und that globalization also entailed the preponderance of space as such, and that our fr amework needed to be enlarged in order to include this fu ndamental component in its questions. Yet, at the same time, the absence of globalization fr om our initial fr amework is explained by our deliberate attempt to reduce this issue to the US context, and it is therefore at once in that context that we need to reformu late the question of space as a new and postmodern problem. I will therefore at this point wish to claim that the unique feature of American space (which I also characterize as a non-national real ity) is a historical construction of the American Constitution, and therefore that whoever interrogates political possibility in the United States must necessarily confront the unique problems posed by that counterrevolutionary document, which also claims to be a fo rm of federalism. Indeed, we must anticipate that AN AM ERICAN UTO PIA federalism will remain a fundamental theoretical issue fo r any utopian projection today. I have argued elsewhere that the collapse of the Soviet Union was not the result of a failure of socialism but rather a failure of federalism, and that the Yugoslavian civil war as well as various federal crises all around the world, from Canada to Spain, from Thailand to Chiapas, are all signs that this is an essen tially unsolved dilemma fo r political theory generally. We will return to it. At any rate, it is under this triple problematic-globalization, space, federalism-that we return to our incomplete inventory of American institutions capable of assuming a decisive role in a situ ation of dual power. What candidates can we identify to play the role of a parallel and non-state power I have been imagining? Almost all of them have suffered the institutional debilitation endemic to late capitalism. Take, fo r example, the post office. In Europe it is a kind of savings bank as well; here it offersa parallel to the census and could presum ably, along with your motor vehicle agency, secure your voting rights. It distributes retirement, pension, and Social Security checks, and is apparently even developing some kind of institutional rela tionship with its fo rmer mortal enemy, the Internet; it mints money, in the fo rm of stamps; it used to be an important source of employ ment, particularly for those seeking to drop out of the system as inconspicuously as possible; and, generally on foot, it offers a unique, even utopian, experience of nature as well as of urban space and an equally unique relationship to the community, where that still exists. But once again, information technology now stands as an absolute historical break with whatever utopias might have been imagined on the basis of this uniquely relational system, about which Lenin, in State and Revolution, took as the Paris Commune's lesson for communism itself: "to organize our whole material econ omy like the postal system, but in such a way that the technical experts, inspectors, clerks, and indeed all persons employed, should receive no higher wage than the working man." 16 FREDRIC JAMESON

The professions do not seem any more promising: the legal profession, for example, could scarcely stand in competition with the state insofar as it is the state in the first place, something confirmed by the judiciary system's loss of autonomy in our time. Ye t the professions-such as lawyers and doctors-possess extremely complex infrastructures capable under certain circum stances of providing an alternate ruling apparatus. Indeed, it might even be argued that the judicial system in this country is already on the point of becoming such an apparatus, with its extensive veto powers on legislation and its virtual population control by way of the penal machinery and its proximity to the various police forces. As in logic, the judgment is the central act around which this system is organized (Kafka'swork is something like a caricature or afterimage of a world in which judgment in this sense is the funda mental reality), and it provides an occasion to reflecton how much of life and experience is excluded when judgment, in all its philo sophical and practical senses, is the fo cus through which the latter are exclusively perceived and organized. It is indeed a kind of dystopia distinct fr om that projected by the conventional image of the military, insofar as power and domination are here replaced by judgment as such, so that the permanent presence of the Other here becomes a far more central (and irresolvable) source of concern and anxiety. For an aging population, the medical profession might seem to offer more promising material, insofar as its material benefits and necessities come doubled by the sort of moral authority with which Plato wanted to surround his philosopher-kings. But the privatiza tion of the hospitals and the institutionalization of the private practitioner bid fair to strip away that aura, and the doctors have fo r the most part had to bow to the economic power of insurance companies and pharmaceutical giants, while their guilds-such as the American Medical Association, which functioned in the past as a powerful anti-political lobby on the order of the National Rifle Association-are seemingly no longer very effective. AN AM ERICAN UTO PIA 17

Yet a society organized around health standards and the produc tion of accessible drugs and fo ods is certainly conceivable: far more than a utopia of lawyers (Callenbach liked to insist on the beneficial litigiousness of his Ecotopia), it would necessarily presuppose the standard elite of philosopher-kings, given the highly specialized knowledge its decisions would seem to presup pose. On the other hand, such a bio-society (for the currently popular prefix seems nowhere quite so appropriate as in this particular fo rmation) seems ready-made fo r corruption and inequality, as the current symbiosis with the insurance companies suggests, along with the various science-fictional fantasies about black-market organ transplants and whole syndicates based on their distribution. Money and wealth are at the very heart of such fantasies, to the point where it seems difficult to separate the medi cal profession out as a distinct structure. Nonetheless, it may not be impossible to imagine crisis situations in which physicians are able to wield social power of considerable significance,in a kind of epidemiological dual structure. Then there are the churches, many of which do function as a nation within the nation and provide solace and the proverbial "heart of a heartless world" to families alienated by late capitalism. Nor was Robespierre wrong, it seems to me, to call, following Rousseau, fo r a state religion, a secular religion of reason of some kind, inasmuch as neither had any other concept fo r what necessar ily binds a society together. I suggest that rather than religion it is the fetish as such that provides social cohesion in those instances in which the latter has been possible: the American Constitution, the French conception of the Republic, the Japanese imperial system, certain repressed national languages-these are so many examples of fetishes which have proved more successful than the usual forms of patriotism and dynastic succession, and any possibility fo r the emergence of a second system of power alongside the first, estab lished and official one, will need to draw on the power of just such a fetish. The fetish-is this to be thought of as a fiction or yet 18 FREDRIC JAM ESON another "as if," the mother's phallus, let alone the phallus itself? Is it a fo rm of belief or religion, let alone the very foundation of all the religions themselves, the bedrock of fanaticism which is somehow to be avoided at all costs, even though it holds everything else together? Or, when we become conscious of it, does it not wither into yet another dried-out, conventional ritual like the flag, thereby becoming useless save fo r the real believers, who are clearly the most dangerous elements? What, in other words, is the truth of the fetish? Might it not be regarded with that ambiguity of modern art, the reflexive kind, which reminds us that it is itself only an impos sible symbol and sends us back to impossibility rather than anything real? Or is a single fetish possible fo r the multiplicity, and should it not be an empty signifier, capable of taking on any number of local meanings while continuing to be worshipped by all? Religion, however, is clearly the most dangerous of all candi dates for dual power, based as it is on what Kant would have called a subreption, a mistaking of superstructure for base: in fact, the target of the Enlightenment was not religion so much as the priest hood, and it is not the extirpation of religion and any absolute secularization which is required so much as a constant surveillance of the various religious movements. Religion itself, as Cornel West has pointed out, is a fu ndamental component of American mass culture: it is a place for the organization of small groups and communities and also the pretext fo r the encouragement of all kinds of manias, fantasies, and wish-fulfillmentsof an individual as well as collective nature. I will argue in a moment that there is a place for both these things in a different kind of society, but that they should be restricted to the realm of culture as such.

But if business, the professions, religion, even the labor unions (let alone the post officeor the Mafia) are inadequate vehicles fo r dual AN AME RICAN UTOPIA 19 power, what can then be left in late capitalism as an already organ ized institution capable of assuming the parallel and ultimately revolutionary role on which alone radical social change depends? This is the moment to mention a finalcandidate, the only subsys tem left which can function in so truly revolutionary a fashion. It is a thought that must have first come to me many years ago, inspired by an image by one of our greatest political cartoonists. I think it must have been during the first year of the Eisenhower presidency, if not still during the campaign, when the last vestiges of the New Deal still survived in Truman's ill-fated campaign for socialized medicine on the English and the Canadian model. Ike, presumably in full military regalia, perches informally on the edge of the desk in the Oval Office and observes conversationally, "Well, if they want socialized medicine, they have only to join the Army as I did." This is indeed very precisely the strategy I propose, the recipe fo r a new fo rm of dual power. Indeed, confirmation comes to us fr om the far fu ture, in a news report fr om the future by Terry Bisson: "August 3, 2076. New Veterans Day. Invoking her power as Commander-in-Chief, President Junni inducts 228 million 'draftees' into the National Guard. Their honorable discharge in 24 hours will guarantee medical care fo r all Americans through the Veterans Administration.''3 I will only add that this bulletin suggests emergency powers already in the power of the president, without any need fo r congressional debate and approval. It also suggests, along with my cartoon, that the best approach to our proposal is precisely through this matter of health care and not through the army's more obvious military functions. The Veterans Administration hospitals have already been described recently (by Senator Sanders) as a system of socialized medicine with no connections whatsoever to the immense private medical and hospi tal organizations surrounding it: their woeful conditions and

3 Terry Bisson, "This Month in History," Locus,August 2011, p. 19. 20 FREDRIC JAMESON deplorable underfunding is then one more illustration, ifany more were needed, of the fate of socialist or even public enclaves within an all-embracing late-capitalist system. But it suffices to look at Cuba, even today, to get an idea of a different kind of medical practice in a radically different system (the papers never make much of it when the Cubans send medical teams to assist their non socialist neighbors during catastrophic emergencies, as they offeredto do in Katrina). At any rate, and returning to the topic at hand, perhaps this particular issue of health care is enough to suggest that the army is a viable candidate fo r the emergence of dual power I have been imagining here: it is not a utopian scheme but eminently practical. Yet I will have to warn you that we will eventually approach a moment, in evoking radical social change and in describing what it is perfectly proper to call a revolution, when the practical project necessarily passes over into a utopian projection.

Excursus 1: On the Withering Away of Political Theory

I have so often deplored the revival of antiquated branches of philosophy-ethics, aesthetics-in a postmodern situation of de-differentiation in which, on the contrary, the various subfields of such a discipline should be asked to fo ld back on each other and disappear (and perhaps along with them, philosophy itself), that it is a pleasure to be able to include political theory among them as well. It should be obvious that the withering away of the state inevitably brings with it the withering away of that thinking whose object is essentially the state as such (the polis). Indeed, in order to see this new army-the universal army in the proper light, it is necessary to understand that it is not a new fo rm of government but rather a new social structure, or better still, a new socioeconomic structure, as we shall see. In the AN AM ERICAN UTO PIA 21 transitional phase-that of dual power-the coexistence of the old state and the new one will indeed seem to be a rivalry of governmental powers; little by little, however, it will be under stood that it is the old state which is in reality the "government," and destined as such to "wither away," and the new structure, which is in fact the society at large or, if you prefer, the comple tion of that "civil society" which Hegel in his own time took to be simply the sphere ofprivate life and ofbusiness and commerce. There are suggestive analogies to this process in antiquity: fo r example, when Augustus founded the Roman Empire as such, he was careful to leave the institutions of the Republic in place. The Senate continued to exist, to meet and deliberate, to give lengthy speeches on the order of those pre-power tribal chieftains of whom we have already spoken, and with the same effects. Meanwhile, antiquity also affords methods of dealing with the fear of dictatorship that inevitably arises in a biological species like our own, in which collectivity is so absolutely sundered from individuation. Indeed, the very word derives from that worthy institution according to which, in a crisis situation, an individual of some unique endowment is accorded exceptional power fo r a limited period of time, after which he sinks back into equality with the population (or is more often simply banished). The crisis itself is then usefully marked by another ancient institu tion, the temple of Janus, whose doors are ceremoniously opened at its onset and then closed again to signal the return to normalcy and the conclusion of the imperilment, in an effort to institution alize what Carl Schmitt famously theorized as the "state of excep tion." Such states are often thought of in terms of William James's symptomatic American misconception, for in America, wars are the moral equivalent of collective action, as witness the great American utopia of World War II. In the twin situation of the economic anarchy of late capitalism and the irreparable ecological damage of nature by contemporary industrial exploi tation (whose simultaneity is not accidental), we must invent 22 FREDRIC JAMESON better temporal models of crisis, long- and short-term, than those afforded by war. We must also cure ourselves of the habit of thinking politically, fo r politics is the art of power and of the state. If the latter is effec tively to wither away, then we must confidently expect political theory to wither away along with it. As I will continue to snipe at political theory throughout, and to argue for its replacement by a properly utopian kind, I will here explain my fundamental posi tion, namely that the essentials of political theory were already established thousands of years ago by Polybius in his codification of the three types of government (or state) and their degenerate fo rms. Everything since then (including Machiavelli) has been engineering the invention of forms of statecraft appropriate to these three fo rms, which are taken as ontology-that is, as given in advance-while Rousseau's cancellation of the scheme, in Th e Social Contract, has rarely been thought through to its utopian conclusion. Political theory takes as its object problems without solutions; utopian speculation solutions without problems. The first consti tutes an ontology which is necessarily obliged to work within the limits of being and of reality as it currently exists. The latter aims at a radical transformation of the present and its system: in that respect, it is the sibling of revolutionary thought and today occu pies the place of a revolutionary politics which has not yet fully reemerged fr om the transformations of globalization and post modernity, of finance capital on a world scale. Utopian thinking demands a revision of Gramsci's famous slogan, which might now run: cynicism of the intellect, utopianism of the will. A generalized cynicism is indeed one way of characterizing the political trans parency of contemporary or postmodern society, in which "they know what they're doing but they do it anyway," in which every one is a Marxist and understands the dynamics and the depreda tions of capitalism without fe eling it possible to do anything about them. AN AM ERICAN UTO PIA 23

The problem with representative systems is deeply embedded in the very nature of political thought itself, whose very name conceals a reference to a specific fo rm of political organization based on slavery-the polis. What I would have liked to argue here at greater length is a critique of political philosophy in general: it is already implicit, of course, in the way Marxism seeks to reground social and political interpretation in the economic and in class; but we can come at it fr om the other side by pointing out the failure of all political theory to constitute its object, which is the collective as such. We have reached a moment philosophically in which people are willing to agree that there is no adequate way of thinking the individual subject, in which various philosophical schools have sought to dispel ideological conceptions of a so-called centered subject and have proposed a variety of untenable alterna tives, from multiple subject positions to a radical separation of consciousness as such from various notions of selves or personal identities. We should be willing to do the same fo r all the fo rms in which thinkers have failed in much the same way to conceptualize collec tive entities. I want to make a philosophical point here; I suppose it is a Kantian one, since it involves the impossibility of thinking certain kinds of things (such as that peculiar thing-in-itself called consciousness, which no human philosopher has ever been able to describe); fo r it seems to me the same with collective reality. That is, owing to our individuation as biological individuals, the collec tive is as such also impossible to conceptualize. This is the point Rousseau was trying to make in The Social Contract by proposing a kind of unthinkable, unrepresentable "regulative idea" in his "general will"; when Kant praised the emergence of the written constitution, he was not endorsing a type of government or state, but rather singling out the moment when a collectivity comes to "maturity" (or the coming to age at which the individual is liber ated fr om tutelage), by taking the formation of the new society into its own hands, as a deliberate and collective act. 24 FREDRIC JAMESON

But here I need to pause and to rectify the misunderstandings Kant's formulation is likely to perpetuate, for the dilemma in thinking the collectivity has in modern times generally led to an unacceptable result, namely that fr om Aristotle to Kant and on, the prejudice that the ultimate aim and endpoint of political theory lies in the drafting of a constitution, conceived as the bringing to an end of revolution rather than its apotheosis. I like Toni Negri's masterful analysis, in which he shows how the arrival of consti tuted (constitutional) power shuts down that brief moment of fr eedom of the constituante, of the construction of power. But remember that the strength of the universal army scheme is that it cuts across the federal constitution in a wholly novel way, trans gressing its boundaries and carefully drawn limits without annul ling it, leaving its map intact beneath a wholly differenttopolo gy. But to return to my argument about the collective (using the most neutral term fo r something that by definition cannot be named, let alone conceptualized) and to pursue its thesis about the latter's unrepresentability: one has only to pass in review the various candidates-tribes, clans, groups, communities, Gemeinschafien, Gesellschafien, mobs, crowds, peoples, nations, democracies, republics, cooperatives, even multitudes (I should add that the concept of social class is not a concept of this kind) to see that all are in the long run both defective and ideological. I take a Kantian critical perspective on the impossibility fo r "reason" to think, let alone to name, the multiple and the plural, a dilemma that generally only comes into view when that other unnamable reality-population-makes its scandalous presence unavoidable yet unmentionable. "Un peuple a venir," was Deleuze 's wise version of this representational impossibility: implying that any name, by suggesting that such a thing already existed, was an oppression and a normative or repressive ideol ogy. This is why the plural cannot have majorities or minorities either; it is also why political theory cannot be a substantive discipline. AN AMERICAN UTOPIA 25

I give a quick example of its insufficiencies before moving on. Recently, the old untenable notion of underdevelopment-unsat isfactory because, as Robert Kurz showed, it implies that develop ment and so-called modernity are still possible-has been succeeded with a new slogan, namely that of the "failed state": a pseudo-concept which really cannot be blamed on the neocons inasmuch as it is today the basis of everyone 's foreign policy. This expression is all the more ridiculous in light of the fact that today all states are failed states, very much including this one (the United States). None of them fu nction, none of them can be patched up, even with the usual band-aids of propaganda. Not even dictator ships work anymore, as we have lately seen; and one is, reluctantly or not, drawn back to Samuel Huntington's scandalous conclu sion, namely that the more democracy there is, the less governable a state-indeed, that genuine democracy is ungovernable and irreconcilable with capitalism. We must, however, draw the oppo site conclusion fr om his, and as a consequence abandon govern ment altogether. In fact, no one wants a state any longer, failed or not; all the factions are united in denouncing it. But as the state is the privi leged subject matter of political theory, we must abandon political theory as well. I return therefore to the proposition that it is popu lation which is both the conceptual and the social scandal: that philosophically fearful thing called the "Other" which has haunted modern thought in recent years is in reality plural, and it is popula tion as such that constitutes otherness. Not overpopulation, as Malthus thought; not underpopulation, as the early-twentieth century French thought (along with other countries today); but simply sheer plurality and multiplicity. Nor is this scandal of the Real to be avoided in the other direc tion by retreating into nostalgic micro-groups or clans of a fantasy ethnic type, the groupuscules of today's politics, the imaginary players in the so-called "culture wars" of current American poli tics. These singularities are as ineffectual, in theory as in practice, 26 FREDRIC JAMESON as the universalities they are supposed to subvert. Yet they are precious symptoms of the inability of late capitalism to provide even the rudiments of collective life; they are the heart of a heart less world, to use Marx's old description of religions and churches. It is not to replace such imagined or, better still, imaginary commu nities and micro-groups of all kinds that the universal army is called upon, but it seems to me there is a better way of putting them in their place (and allowing them to flourish as they will), and this brings us to the substitution of utopian thinking fo r poli tics and political theory. This is also the moment when we pass fr om what remains a concrete political program-the conscription of the entire popula tion into some glorified National Guard-to that rather different matter which is the imagining of utopias. And here, to be sure, we enter a no-man's-land (which is also that of dual power), in which assessments of the current situation give way to personal and private visions of all kinds and in which rational revolutionary calculations necessarily give way to fantasy, including those of the crackpots and oddballs who were our great utopian thinkers. This is therefore the moment in which we may all begin to diverge, substituting our private utopian predilections and gadgets for sober analysis.

But we are not yet so far, and fo r the moment remain with banal historical and political reality. The army we currently have is what is called a volunteer army, that is, a commercial profession like any other. I need not remind us of the history of citizen armies, fr om the Greeks to Machiavelli, and very much including the French Revolution. These armies, based on the draft, had political missions, most notably in modern times to fo rge the nation out of a variety of local and provincial populations sometimes not even AN AMERICAN UTOPIA 27 speaking the national language (itself a political creation of the new national state). To be sure, nowadays the media have already done that fo r us, but the usefulness of the analogy lies in the fact that, in our federal system, the army is virtually the only institu tion to transcend the jurisdiction of state laws and boundaries, divisions which were among the most important counterrevolu tionary principles embedded in the American Constitution, itself one of the most successful counterrevolutionary schemes ever devised. No genuine systemic change can take place here without an abrogation of the Constitution-a foundational fetish, as I have claimed, and a document the left itself would be as loath to fo rfeit as the right, owing to the protections of the Bill of Rights. The signal advantage of the army as a system is that it transcends that document without doing away with it; it coexists with it at a differ ent spatial level and becomes thereby a potentially extraordinary instrument in the erection of dual power. As fo r the draft, it is preeminently symbolic that Nixon ended the draft in order to put an end to popular, and in particular student, resistance to the war in Vietnam (Johnson had already modified the draft with hosts of class and racial exemptions in order to limit its political impact). More recently, during the Iraq war or what we may call the Rumsfeld period, this professional army has been fu rther privatized-and I insist on the relevance of this word fo r the way it underscores the relationship with the variety of other economic or free-market privatizations all over the world inaugu rated by the Reagan-Thatcher regimes. Rumsfeld fu rther privat ized this already specialized and salaried private army by outsourc ing many of its functions to private corporations of the Blackwater type, and by introducing complex advanced technology in order to render other portions of the military workforce redundant that is, by downsizing them via mechanization (a process Marx described in Capital). This very significant moment in the history of the modern army had a political purpose above and beyond its adaptation of current late-capitalist business practices: that purpose FREDRIC JAMESON was to remove this small professionalized group possessing Weber's proverbial monopoly of violence (currently only .05 percent of the population) fr om any possibility of mass democratic action and, fu rther, to assimilate it to the structure of the police fo rce, which it seems now to have become on a global scale. So the first step in my utopian proposal is, so to speak, the rena tionalization of the army along the lines of any number of other socialist candidates fo r nationalization (some of which I mentioned above), by reintroducing the draft to transform the present armed fo rces back into that popular mass force capable of coexisting successfully with an increasingly unrepresentative "representative government," and transforming it into a vehicle fo r mass democ racy rather than the representative kind. Inasmuch as the army continues to be associated with the vari ous coups d'etat of modern times all over the world, as well as with all the wars it has been called on to wage in recent years, I will at once specify the most important steps in the process. First of all, the body of eligible draftees would be increased by including everyone fr om sixteen to fifty, or, if you prefer, sixty years of age: that is, virtually the entire adult population. Such an unmanagea ble body would henceforth be incapable of waging fo reign wars, let alone carrying out successful coups. In order to emphasize the universality of the process, let's add that the handicapped would all be found appropriate positions in the system, and that pacifists and conscientious objectors would be placed in control of arms development, arms storage, and the like. , Now I need to remind you of the breadth of the military system, particularly under the pre-Rumsfeld dispensation.4 We have already begun with medical attention, and in particular the veter ans' hospitals, which are currently in desperate straits, at the very moment when hospitals themselves, the private kind, have become

4 See on all this Jennifer Mittelstadt, Th e Rise of the Military We lfare State, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015. AN AMERICAN UTOPIA 29 big business in the United States. In our new universal system, of course, the military hospitals would become a free national health service open to everyone (insofar as everyone is now a service person or a veteran) and the entire center of gravity of universal health care, and also, I would add, pharmaceutical production, disease control, and experimentation with and production of new medicines, would now be reorganized and situated within the army itself. We may also assume a reorientation of education itself under military auspices, not merely fo r the children of this military popu lation but fo r various advanced degrees. Nowadays it is difficultto think of any kind of advanced training, save perhaps fo r business schools, that would not be required within this system (the Army Corps of Engineers is the obvious example). We may think of the socialist (or ex-socialist) countries for models of our situation, in which the various armies included such functions as the manufac ture of clothing, the production of films, the eventual production of motor vehicles, and even (as in China) a writers' union, in which intellectuals and writers and artists fo und their space and income. The army is also notoriously the source of manpower fo r disaster relief, infrastructural repair and construction and the like; the question of fo od supply would immediately place this institution (if it can still be called that) in charge of the ordering and supply of food production and therefore in a controlling position fo r that fundamental dietetic and agronomic activity as well.

The utopian tradition, indeed, offers many different kinds of examples of an attempt to project a future or at least a better social structure fr om the army as a collective institution, inevitably beginning with Plato's Republic (and with the image of Sparta that haunts the ancient world) and fertilizing the monastic system of 30 FREDRIC JAMESON the Middle Ages (whose open identification with the army is at length disclosed by Loyola). These thought experiments all seem, in various proportions, to deploy emphases on discipline and hier archy, issues that scarcely vanish fr om their modern counterparts. But the emergence of the modern armies, with firepower and the transformation of discipline into a new and as it were Cartesian or mathematical kind of exercise (with Maurice ofNassau), introduce a new issue that modifies this traditional semiotic: it is the relation ship to the civilian population, or, stated another way, the possibil ity of a substitution, fo r the standing army, of citizen militias (Machiavelli), or later on, as its virtual climax, the nation-in-arms of the French Revolution. It is as though the practice of the ancient Greek city-states had reemerged, transformed into a political and social issue by modernity as such (something that could only have been thinkable with the reemergence of the city-state as a fo rm in medieval Italy, along with the charged word "commune," which will have a glorious fu ture ahead of it). This means that the association of a new utopian state with armies and army organization can henceforth cut both ways: it can serve as a new form of social articulation, as the modern army begins to translate hierarchy into a differentiation of functions, or it can aim at democratizing the army itself and inventing some new relationship between civilian society and this fo reign body which has come into extraterritorial existence in its midst. If we take Edward Bellamy and his "industrial army" as the most dramatic exemplification of the first of these tendencies, then it becomes clearer that the articulation in question is historically imposed by the development of industry itself, with its multiplicity of fu nc tions and operations. As fo r the second, it becomes perhaps clear est in Jean J aures' s proposal fo r a nouvelle armee in the years imme diately preceding Wo rld War I, when, after the defeat of 1870 and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, the French were only too conscious of yet another possible conflictwith their militarily sophisticated and powerful neighbor. Without trying to assess the cultural limits this AN AMERICAN UTOPIA 31 mythological conflict places on that internationalist refusal of the war credits so crucial to Zimmerwald and the future communist movement, it is only fair to underscore Jaures's insistence on the pursuit of an essentially defensive war, a precondition which leads him to the question of the reserves and their use. They must be territorial and integrated into their local societies. Unlike the initial function of national conscription, meant to remove locals fr om their provincial habitats and instill in them some awareness of the new national framework and the national language, Jaures's proposal aims at emphasizing the commitment of the reserves to their local terrain and social life, thus fo reseeing a resistance of localities on the ground to impede the fo rward movement of an enemy army of the old style. It is a proposal in which one can recognize the tradition of the militias and the evolving fo rtunes of guerrilla warfare, from the Spanish resistance to Napoleon all the way to the jihadists of the present day. "The guerrilla must move among the people like a fishin the water," said Mao Ze-dong, in a fo rmula which emphasizes difference fully as much as identity, no longer affirmingthe assimilation of army and people but rather the emergence of professional revolutionaries. Only in the Cuban foco theory (theorized by Regis Debray) will the two entities know a new kind of utopian fu sion, but this in a space beyond city and country (bourgeois and peasant) alike-the Sierra Maestra. The generational appearance of a kind of aristocracy of the partisan or revolutionary families and their descendants in postrevolutionary societies is then a development as ominous fo r future socialists and postrevolutionary states as the emergence of the feudal barons in the Dark Ages. Trotsky's version of military democracy, more modern than the militia tradition, then returns to Bellamy's model, but in a situa tion of absolute crisis, in the midst of the war communism of the besieged Soviet state. His aggressive defense of discipline is a welcome antidote to the democratic platitudes of Kautsky and the Social Democrats and of the Mensheviks and their fo llowers, and FREDRIC JAMESON should today be replaced in the context of a generalized left attack on representative political systems, a critique in my opinion better served by the abandonment of the even more provocative termi nology of a "dictatorship of the proletariat," however much its spirit should be affirmed. Terms like "democracy," which are, as it were, the private property of US foreign policy more generally, do not regain their fo rce unless we grasp them in Samuel Huntington's sense, alluded to above, namely that democracy and capitalism are incompatible (big business cannot fu nction in a situation in which budgets and fiscalpolicies in general are decided by popular vote). Trotsky is indeed very strong in his reminder that "free" in such contexts has the primary denotation of wage labor: "for the liberal, freedom in the long run means the market."5 Freedom is not some eternal metaphysical or Platonic concept, it is historically deter mined, with its fundamental reference anchored in the experience of human temporality, which is to say of labor:

History has known slave labor. History has known serf labor. History has known the regulated labor of the medieval craft guilds. Throughout the world there now prevails hired labor, which the yellow journalists of all countries oppose, as the highest fo rm of liberty, to Soviet 'slavery.' We , on the other hand, oppose capitalist slavery by socially regulated labor on the basis of an economic plan, obligatory fo r the whole people and consequently compulsory fo r each worker in the country.6

It is worth observing that this amphiboly of "freedom," a pseudo concept that slips regularly from labor to the metaphysical, is one of the fu ndamental roots of anti-utopianism (as well as of the anti communism into which it is regularly translated). The transcenden tal content of such metaphysical notions of freedom is itself of course

5 Leon Trotsky, Te rrorism and Communism, London: Verso, 2007, 132. 6 Ibid. AN AMERICAN UTOPIA 33 historical; but it varies less swiftly than the empirical political or social referent which is its other dimension (social hierarchy, busi ness freedoms, gun ownership, etc.) and which is as it were respecta bilized and lent the appearance of some eternal philosophical value by the loftier concept with which it is confused. (Foucault, indeed, theorized just such amphibolies as "empirico-transcendental doublet," although he perhaps associated their emergence too narrowly with nineteenth-century historicism.) But it is time to quote Trotsky's version of "militarism" in more detail:

One of the Menshevik orators attempted incidentally to represent me as a defender of militarism in general. According to his informa tion, it appears, do you see, that I am defending nothing more or less than German militarism. I proved, you must understand, that the German NCO was a marvel of nature, and all that he does is above criticism. What did I say in reality? Only that militarism, in which all the fe atures of social evolution find their most finished, sharp and clear expression, could be examined fr om two points of view. First fr om the political or socialist-and here it depends entirely on the question of what class is in power; and second, fr om the point of view of organization, as a system of the strict distribu tion of duties, exact mutual relations, unquestioning responsibility and harsh insistence on execution. The bourgeois army is the appa ratus of savage oppression and repression of the workers; the social ist army is a weapon fo r the liberation and defense of the workers. But the unquestioning subordination of the parts to the whole is a characteristic of every army. A severe internal regime is inseparable fr om the military organization. In war every piece of slackness, every lack of thoroughness, and even a simple mistake, not infre quently bring in their train the most heavy sacrifices. Hence the striving of the military organization to bring clearness, definiteness, exactness of relations and responsibilities, to the highest degree of development. "Military" qualities in this connection are valued in 34 FREDRIC JAMESON

every sphere. It was in this sense that I said that every class prefers to have in its service those of its members who, other things being equal, have passed through the military school. The German peas ant, fo r example, who has passed out of the barracks in the capacity of an NCO was fo r the German monarchy, and remains fo r the Ebert Republic, much dearer and more valuable than the same peas ant who has not passed through military training. The apparatus of the German railways was splendidly organized, thanks to a consid erable degree to the employment of NCOs and officers in adminis trative posts in the transport department. In this sense we also have something to learn fr om militarism. Comrade Tsyperovich, one of our fo remost trade union leaders, admitted here that the trade union worker who has passed through military training-who has, fo r example, occupied the responsible post of regimental commissary fo r a year-does not become worse from the point of view of trade union work as a result. He is returned to the union the same prole tarian fr om head to fo ot, fo r he was fighting fo r the proletariat; but he has returned a veteran-hardened, more independent, more decisive-for he has been in very responsible positions. He had occasions to control several thousands of Red soldiers of different degrees of class-consciousness-most of them peasants. Together with them he has lived through victories and reverses, he has advanced and retreated. There were cases of treachery on the part of the command personnel, of peasant risings, of panic-but he remained at his post, he held together the less class-conscious mass, directed it, inspired it with his example, punished traitors and cowards. This experience is a great and valuable experience. And when a fo rmer regimental commissary returns to his trade union,

he becomes not a bad organizer.7

Two distinct issues are at stake here. The first is the structural parallelism between the army and the seemingly more complex

7 Ibid., 160-l. AN AMERICAN UTOPIA 35 mechanisms ofpro ductive society: Is the army a miniature version of society, or simply an organic part within that society that might be called upon to fillsome of its other functions in an emergency? The situation in which Trotsky is writing his pamphlet corre sponds to those emergency moments, but his more general posi tion on the "militarization" of society generally of course demands the first to be argued-it being understood, once again, that mili tarization here means neither war nor the bearing of weapons, nor even military drills, but rather the discipline involved in ensuring that the functions required for society's existence be secured by something like conscription. But another theme runs through this passage and is indeed implicit in all the "militarizing" theorists to whom we are appeal ing here, and that is the pedagogical vocation of the process, which is in effect self-propelling. In order to carry out the new social fu nctions, trainees, recruits, conscripts, fo rmer civilians, have to be educated; they have to be taught how to carry out their new duties, and it is an education that may, in situations like that of the nascent Soviet Union, extend as far as literacy itself. Meanwhile, however, once secured, the new tasks propel their users on to higher levels of that education, and on to new skills which will then fu rther complexify the social edifice. This is what has since come to be identified as "cultural revolu tion" (a term in fact invented by Lenin) and at first used to desig nate the literacy campaigns which everywhere transformed peas ants into industrial workers and pre-capitalist fo rmations into capitalism (and, in this case, into socialism). It is worth saying another word about cultural revolution, which can abstractly designate the transformation of subjectivities, but which clearly enough bears on education and therefore on culture in general. When the "life of the mind" is no longer the plaything of aristo cratic leisure classes and a literal pastime (as in Aristotle), there is initiated an inexorable evolution of knowledge and its ancillary cultures toward the applied. This has meant not only the eclipse of FREDRIC JAMESON pure or speculative science, but also the rooting out or stifling, in modernity and postmodernity, of the metaphysical impulse and the gradual effacement of artistic production itself, save fo r commercial and decorative purposes (even the uses of "great art" fo r financial investment are threatened by the marginalization of the humanities and its transformation into a sandbox affair). It is natural enough, indeed quite inevitable, that in a socialist society this process will be accelerated, inasmuch as the various disciplines and knowledge practices will be ever more transparently interro gated fo r their social value and assessed in terms of their cost to society. It seems unlikely that the specialized institutes housed within the army by some social fo rmations will be sufficient to shelter what are viewed, whether in the sciences, philosophy or the arts, as sheer gratuitous exercises. I have elsewhere suggested that we misunderstand an older tradition of "socialist realism" as the mere production of propa ganda icons fo r Stakhanovism; on the contrary, the mission of socialist realism is the relentless critique of bureaucracy, the most dangerous tendency at work in any socialist society and its inevi table structural accompaniment. Let me now add that modernism and its accompanying aesthetics, mostly organized around defenses of the so-called "autonomy of art," paradoxically offer the strongest avenue fo r the integration of art in a socialist soci ety, fo r all such apologies insist on the fu nction of art as negation, and it is around the negation of every actually existing society and its practices that the vocation of art needs to be organized and defended. Like the ombudsman in the arena of power, the exist ence of art is to be justified by the necessity of its negative and critical function, which ranges fr om outright social content to the very practices of sense perception itself (as in abstract art) and the conduct of daily life. Cultural revolution, as education itself should be renamed in the new dispensation, must necessarily be grasped not only as the acquisition of new skills but also as the experience of an implacable and sometimes even intolerable AN AMERICAN UTOPIA 37 negativity to be trained against those skills and the positivist and empiricist world they inevitably end up constructing. This would then practically correspond to Delany's "unlicensed sector" in his urban projection of utopia/ anti-utopia (see below), and would stand as a perpetual and perpetually exacerbating rebuke of prag matism, empiricism, the practical, the socially useful, the legal and the normative, the habitual, law and order, and every well behaved and traditional tenet of social reproduction, very much including, of course, that "discipline" which constitutes the deep est dystopian fe ar of army life. The complaint-grumbling and grousing-is the most fu ndamental privilege of modern life, Deleuze once observed; whether it can be thus institutionalized is then a very central challenge to all utopian construction, whose success in that sense is its failure, so that it will urgently need to find a way to make that failure a success.

But the advantage of the military fo rm fo r the imagination/ construction of an American utopia is spatial; and it is time to return to that theme in a more limited and concrete fashion. This will also entail a more direct assessment of the American Constitution in the political organization of a state essentially devised to resist revolutionary transformations (from the right as well as fr om the left). It has indeed been said that the fu ndamental feature of the Constitution in this respect has less to do with the well-known governmental separation of powers with the displace ment of a differentkind of separation in the affirmationof civilian control over the military. It is this, however, that I propose to grasp in spatial terms. Whatever the historical origins of the original colonies in geographical constraints and the contingencies of settlement, it seems clear that the fo rm of the individual states represents the FREDRIC JAMESON greatest barrier to social and political transformation, although not necessarily to economic development (inasmuch as the princi pal function of the Supreme Court lies in assuring the applicability of basic economic practices-such as the actantial unity of the "soulful" corporation-across state borders). The state fo rm (and now I utilize the word "state" in its local American sense, as something like a unit, a district, a province, and so forth) is now no longer geographical, as one of the fu ndamental oppositional works of the 1960s-Joel Garreau's Th e Seven Nations of No rth America, later revised as Th e Nine Nations of No rth America-argued. It is only when the borders of such unities correspond to essential geographical identities-those that deter mine unique patterns of survival and thus eventually the distinc tive fo rms of a specifically regional daily life-that the dilemmas and the contradictions of federalism begin to appear. They then take the fo rm of what the Lacanians call the theft of enjoyment on a collective level, or what tradition simply calls envy: most clearly visible when it is a question of the possession of unique mineral rights, or of a rich soil that favors a prosperous agriculture in distinction to one which is unpromising and unforgiving, but in which for that very reason a certain kind of industry has begun incomparably to flourish. This fo rm of collective or even cultural envy can also fasten on seemingly negative features: one can, in other words, envy a peculiarly industrious people whose self discipline and even sacrifice would seem to be repellent to a popu lation given to taking its ease. (I will defend the political uses of these Lacanian concepts at a later stage.) Federalism is precisely that conflict and the delicate balancing out of such hostile impulses (just as Fourierism-again, we will come back to this later on-proposes solutions on an individual basis). Federalism is thus very specificallya utopian impulse and a utopian dilemma: Thomas More deftly sidestepped it by dividing his eponymous island into identical counties (which nonetheless correspond allegorically to the radical differences and unevenness AN AMERICAN UTOPIA 39 of his own historically real London or England). Federalism is, however, to be grasped less as a solution to such dilemmas as rather an embrace of the contradiction, a reveling in its impossibilities and its negativities. But it is precisely such contradictions which the American Constitution, or rather the development of the state system into which it eventually evolves, is designed to repress, its uniformities serving a purely negative function in their exclusion of any kind of centralizing political project. The jealously guarded autonomy of state law (save, as I underscored, fo r business practices) ensures the overruling of collective impulses and projects. This is then the preeminent advantage of the army as a parallel fo rm which is distributed in enclaves throughout the geographical expanse in a way that ignores state boundaries and on a dimension incommensurable with the laws of individual states. It therefore offers the possibilities of a dual power, which has in fact been anticipated in certain historical instances, as when desegregation of the armed fo rces took place across states still rigidly organized around apartheid and Jim Crow regulations. The network of the universal army (or of military democracy) is one that permits a new kind of decentralization, enabling a variety of collective units fr om cities to villages to flourish across the fo rmer state lines, all of them linked by what is truly utopian about the Internet (whose utopian capacities have too often been celebrated in purely idealis tic and anti-institutional ways). Raymond Williams indeed once said that socialism would not be simpler than capitalism, but much more complicated. The flashpoint in this overlap of two distinct systems lies clearly enough in the existence of the inappropriately named National Guard, a kind of secondary army under the control of the gover nors of the individual states. It is, for example, conceivable that a nationwide mobilization of the armed fo rces could find itself in opposition to National Guard units defending the local interests of individual states and their substantive as well as structural 40 FREDRIC JAMESON resistance to a more extensive and unified revolutionary policy at the level of a nationwide "military democracy" as such. This kind of crisis would then clearly demonstrate the reality of the notion of dual power and its effectiveness as a practical-political strategy. But at this point as well, we begin to pass from issues of political strategy as such to more utopian projections of what might be expected to emerge fr om such a revolutionary practice. For unlike previous revolutions, in which there has always been a firm-if ideological-distinction between the revolutionary event itself and the new revolutionary order expected to emerge fr om it (however much this order is recoded as a permanent revolution or an ongoing revolutionary transformation, etc.), the transition proposed here cannot but ensure the persistence of "military" features in any postrevolutionary society. (Trotsky's account comes closest to admitting this continuity and, indeed, to embrac ing and defending it.) We must therefore at this point shift gears and pass fr om a political proposal to a utopian one.

It is, however, appropriate at this point to underscore the transfor mations that the idea of utopia, and indeed its name, have under gone in recent times, where both the connotations of a non-place (U-topia) and a better place (eu-topia) have largely ceased to apply. After the emergence of the very concept of "history" in the French Revolution, where the possibility of an intentional and pragmatic transformation of society became actual fo r the first time, the utopian will largely came to signify, fo r practical-political movements, the impractical and unrealizable: this is how Marx used the word, making exceptions fo r the truly revolutionary social experiments of Robert Owen and the psychological or thought experiments of a Fourier (whom Engels considered little more than a social satirist; as fo r Owen, Lenin himself came back AN AMERICAN UTOPIA 41 to him at the end of his life). In fact, we may consider Marx's stric tures on utopian socialism (in the Manifesto, fo r example) as acknowledgements of the increasingly political character of utopian movements and the competition they were likely to offer to any genuinely socialist or communist politics. A fu rther shift in the fu nction of such speculations was then inevitable after the Soviet revolution itself, when various utopian isms (that of Bogdanov, for example) proved likely to have a prac tical influence on the direction of Bolshevik policy. Meanwhile, all the revolutionary upheavals ofmodern times have released utopian impulses of all kinds, including the most grotesque fo rms (such as the interstellar immortalities of a Florensky), and it is essential to include the mark of the subjective daydream and its ineradicable personal singularity in any approach to the utopian system (as distinguished fr om the political project or proposal as such, which must speak an intelligible collective language). What fo llows then must necessarily acknowledge its quotient of individual fantasy, as opposed to political tracts which demand practical assessment. However, and it is this which marks the evolution of utopian ideas in our own time, we must also recognize the increasing difficulty of distinguishing the two in a political time in which politics must again begin by igniting individual fantasies, while "utopian" has once again become a designator for certain specific political practices. This is indeed what happened to the concept in the Cold War period, in which the analogies between the various kinds of politi cal dictatorships gave rise to the ideologeme of "totalitarianism." Particularly since the collapse of the Soviet experiment, it has become fashionable to detect the seeds of the totalitarian within the utopian itself and to transform the hoary fo lk wisdom of the adage "the perfect is the enemy of the good" into an anti-utopian political position for which the politics of radical change (defined fr om the outset as unrealizable, fo r those imperfect and even sinful beings we are) must inevitably lead to violence, as "human nature" 42 FREDRIC JAMESON is brutally pressed into an unnatural mold and forced to take on utopian and superhuman dimensions. Anti-utopianism is thereby transformed into a vehicle fo r anti-communism and a generalized anti-radicalism (Nazism no longer being available as a "revolu tionary" doctrine, and the religious character of jihadism standing in apparent conflict with secular utopianisms) and the political uses of utopianism thereby hopefully neutralized. But in the last years, utopia has again changed its meaning and has become the rallying cry fo r left and progressive fo rces and a virtual synonym fo r socialism or communism, now fo r the moment tainted words or programs. It needs to be said that this is a genera tional change and that it seems to reflect a wholesale transforma tion in the social, political, and economic attitudes of those who came to maturity during the 1990s, when the collapse of the tradi tional left movements made it possible to see just how predatory capitalism was when left to its own devices. This is a generation in a position to see that no real distinctions can be made between capitalism and electoral politics, and that Hayek and Huntington were right when they argued that capitalism was incompatible with genuine mass democracy. But despite moments like those of Occupy, which have begun to appear fitfully all over the world and in extraordinarily diverse settings, this new utopianism was not a movement like Bellamy's old nineteenth-century political party. Both emerged from the fail ures of the left: in Bellamy's case the collapse of populism, in the present situation the collapse of liberal, left, and radical move ments. Both took place in situations of economic crisis; clearly enough today it is the prospect of permanent unemployment that has reignited a search fo r some radically different socioeconomic system than the one currently in place. But present-day utopian ism remains fo r the moment a youth movement (using the term in a different sense); other strata of the population have different if provisional allegiances, and in other parts of the world comparable youth movements are often armed and articulated by religious AN AMERICAN UTOPIA 43 ideologies when not traditional political ones. The fact is that utopianism in the We st is not an organized movement of any kind, nor is it unified by any more systematic cultural ideology, even though on the economic level it shares a general consensus on the failure of capitalism (that is, it embraces Marxism as a negative and critical analysis of capitalism, without any longer being attracted to the cultural, social, and political traditions established over a century by the communist movement). Perhaps, then, the task of utopianism today is rather to propose more elaborated versions of an alternate social system than simply to argue the need fo r one; the fo llowing pages will do just that, with the proviso that, as a thought experiment, they leave open the possibility of very different combinations of the elements which any contemporary politics or social thinking must somehow confront, absorb, or modify.

The utopia of the universal army was based on the presupposition (common enough, I think, to all utopias in the tradition) of the withering away not only of the state but also of politics as such. (See the excursus on the political above.) This leaves two fu rther dimensions of the social order in direct and unmediated confronta tion with each other, namely production and culture: what our daily life under capitalism commonly calls work and leisure, or what the Marxian tradition has perpetuated in one of the oldest and most stigmatized stereotypes on the books, namely the distinction between base and superstructure, or in more general terms, between economic production and culture in the broadest sense. There was always, indeed, a slippage and a hesitation in Marxist theory about whether power and politics were part of the super structure or part of the base; but we have now eliminated that problem by excluding the political altogether, and have thereby 44 FREDRIC JAMESON not diminished but rather greatly increased the distance between the economic and the cultural (of which our current distinction between work and leisure is little more than an ideological caricature). I will not pursue the theoretical debate on base and superstruc ture, which has its own history and complications, except to say that I feel that it is methodologically useful when taken as a start ing point fo r questions and problems, rather than as a solution of any kind. Base and superstructure are in other words a beginning and not a conclusion, a laboratory experiment (whose results are often very different fr om each other) and not the tenet of some quasi-religious belief or orthodoxy. Here, however, we are approaching the opposition as a struc ture, a utopian fr amework, in which it looks a little more like the famous distinction between the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom, rather than static dimensions of this or that phenomenon or text. There never was a problem about some general identifica tion of the "base" with production; it was always the ways in which culture could constitute its superstructure which remained open to debate, often of the most ferocious kind. But the notion of the base itself raises several problems. The first is working time: how long would everyone have to work (in the sense of ordinary drudgery, the necessary tasks, and the like) in order fo r everyone 's needs to be fulfilled? In the utopian 1960s, in the era of Herbert Marcuse and Rudolf Bahro, these necessary working hours were reckoned to be something like three or four hours a day: I don't know what the calculations would be today, in an age of far greater productiv ity, but I find it symptomatic and a little sad that the question is never posed anymore and is felt to be of absolutely no practical or theoretical interest. The other feature is precisely that of productivity and technol ogy, and it seems to me that such developments take care of them selves (under a very different motivational system than what we currently have in capitalism). The real problem is not production AN AMERICAN UTO PIA 45

and productivity, but rather distribution: and here we return to the reef of federalism, on which so many social experiments, including the Soviet Union itself, have foundered. For however distribution is calculated for individuals-and here I leave to one side one of the greatest of all utopian hobbies, that of inventing new kinds of money, new fo rms of wages, new techniques of transfer and circu lation-we may expect greater quantities of new proposals here. (Mine would be, at least fo r the transitional stage, a new two-tiered currency system, in which the wealthy-the CEOs, the stock holders, the financiers-are paid in a separate, as it were "foreign tourist," currency whose use is restricted to internal investment, while the rest of us proceed on with our normal everyday cash and our everyday debts and payments.) But, however distribution be calculated fo r individuals, the larger problem is that of geographi cal or spatial inequalities, in which richer and more productive regions are asked in effectto support poorer ones, which to be sure people do not want to do. I will come back to this crucial problem in a moment. As for the other kind of distribution, that of jobs and tasks, necessary or elective, in today's generalized and structural employ ment crisis we do not need to be told that these are no longer matters of freedom. In Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed, jobs were assigned by computer according to the talents and capacities of the individuals concerned. Robert Reich has explained that in the future no one should expect to work at the same job fo r the whole of his or her life, but should look forward to constant displacements and a multiplicity of differentkinds of activities and practical responsibilities, if not indeed to permanent unemploy ment. In our utopian system, full employment is the highest social priority and an absolute presupposition of social organization, and everything must be planned in order to secure it, even when the job in question is not particularly productive. Full employment is far more important than productivity, and I will remind us that in the earliest years of the Chinese revolution, in a period of heady FREDRIC JAMESON socialist enthusiasm and optimism, even the very elderly and the infirm were given minimal tasks, such as sweeping the sidewalk in the morning, so that the entire society was active in this unimagi nably complex set of simultaneities and relationships which make up a functioning social totality. Or, putting it the other way around, in the utopian psychological system we are about to propose, the most damaging pathology is that of unemployment as such. It is in the distribution of employment, however, that the most crucial utopian problems arise. They have to do with specialization, innovation versus stagnation, efficiency, hierar chy, monopoly, and ultimately with work and leisure themselves. Computerization and information technology are clearly central to all the items in such a discussion; and I have already observed that the question of computers (into which Heidegger's old "question of technology" has today morphed) seems both to have fueled a new kind of utopian enthusiasm and new kinds of utopian fantasies, at the same time that it has virtually shut down the imagination and production of new utopias. It is as though the computer were a kind of black box, capable of solving all problems of organization in a quasi-magical way, so that they do not any longer have to be addressed and concretely imagined or organized into thought experiments. Thus Le Guin's utopias solve their problems-the assignment of work, distribution and the like-by way of computers, which thereby take the place of the traditional philosopher-kings. If one is not willing to accept this solution, however, there exists another, far more unexpected, disturbing, and paradoxical solution in Barbara Goodwin's conception of the lottery as a central mechanism fo r the distribution of tasks and goods in complex modern and potentially globalized societies.8 This is, if you like, a classical solution, a revival of processes in ancient

8 Barbara Goodwin, justice by Lottery, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. AN AMERICAN UTOPIA 47 society which fu nctioned as referenda or other fo rms of electoral decision-making. In effect, the lottery annuls or sidesteps all the theoretical problems associated with representative "democ racy" (see again the digression on the political above) and guar antees a mechanism fo r equality which replaces the more famil iar social or revolutionary proposals fo r abolishing class and hierarchy. Equally obviously, however, it raises questions of specialization and competence that in an age of new technologies would no longer seem adequately dealt with by Lenin's cook or his postman. We may assume that certain basic questions of specialization will have been simplified by new fo rms of education in the army schools, but we may still findit difficultto abandon age-old notions of specifictalents or gifts, and wonder how someone without what are customarily called "language skills" or "mathematical gifts" could function efficientlyin jobs demanding those activities. This is the point at which to argue against the very notion of efficiency: such an argument is indeed a central component of any properly utopian "cultural revolution," and I open a large parenthesis here on this issue.

10.

There are of course ideological critiques which are an integral part of any cultural revolution, but I suspect they are somewhat differ ent fr om the more global critiques of what we may call ideological beliefs-free-market fundamentalism, fo r example, the conviction that capitalism is the only possible system and that fu ndamental change is impossible, and so fo rth, ultimately reaching such prop ositions as the nonexistence of social classes (and that to insist on them is to provoke violence) and so fo rth. The specifically socialist ideological critiques I have in mind at this stage have more to do with praxis and daily life, with habit and FREDRIC JAMESON

performance. I would above all want to single out the commitment to efficiency as a fu ndamental value: an assumption that, presum ably based on common sense, fans out into a rationale fo r austerity as a politico-economic program and a belief in progress as a mode of temporality. Efficiency as a "value" is one of the forms taken by the logic of capitalism, already theorized in a variety of ways, fo r example in Max Weber's fundamental concept of rationalization, in Adorno and Horkheimer's useful specification of the latter as "instrumentalization," and in much of the protest literature of the sixties. Mathematization, quantification, and the like are also ways we can come at this fundamental reorganization of daily life and practices, which is, we might suggest, the phenomenological dimension of some specifically capitalist "cultural revolution." Paradoxically, these themes-which are all versions of the same general characterization of the procedures needed for capitalism to function in an increasingly "modern" way-also lend them selves to a powerful polemic move, namely a one-sided and self destructive caricature of Enlightenment itself as a desiccated and alienating promotion of reason over the other human capacities: this critique of the Enlightenment then, particularly in the late nineteenth century and the Industrial Age, developed into a power fu l cultural and philosophical movement, with fo rms reaching fr om religious revival to vitalisms of all kinds, and one on which the so-called "irrationalisms" of fascism and other anti-modern movements could draw. The Marxist critique of "instrumentalization," to stick with that particular term for the wealth of critical themes we have only begun to indicate, is not to be confused with this reactionary and anti-modernist attack on the Enlightenment; Marxism is a comple tion of the Enlightenment rather than a repudiation of it: a prole tarian Enlightenment, we might say, which fu lfills the promise of the bourgeois (eighteenth-century) Enlightenment that preceded it. This is an affirmationwhich incidentally involves the reevalua tion of Romanticism as such, as the inevitable reaction against the AN AMERICAN UTOPIA 49 more limited fo rms taken by eighteenth-century secularisms. Insofar as Romanticism is taken as a wholesale repudiation of Enlightenment, it can obviously be enlisted in the anti-modern isms and reactionary movements of the twentieth century; insofar as we can infer a progressive Romanticism which contains the elements of critique of capitalism (it has not sufficiently been understood, for example, that Edmund Burke 's critique of the Jacobins is in fact an attack on capitalism), then such Romanticism becomes a positive resource fo r revolutionary and utopian movements. Meanwhile, this profound political ambiguity is prolonged to the present day, when revolution is seen as pulling the emergency brake on capitalism's headlong flight into "progress" (Benjamin) and left programs and projects themselves are grasped in a spirit of conservatism and of preserving the older and more humane communities and ways ofliving against the inhuman or posthuman development oflate-capitalist technology. This is to fo rget Marx's own enthusiasm fo r new scientific discoveries and new technolo gies of all kinds and his conviction that socialism would be a more advanced society than capitalism; it is to encourage an unpro ductive Luddism and an anarchism with purely negative views of technology, easily accused of a commitment to vandalism and destruction; and it is to distract us from the task of imagining what a genuinely post-capitalist society might look like if it attempted to preserve everything fo r which today we have a grateful and complicit enthusiasm, even as we disintoxicate ourselves from the older system's powerful addictions. At any rate, it seems to me that a systematic repudiation of the ideology of efficiencyoffers a fr amework fo r a rethinking of the whole complex of notions which include technology and progress. Indeed, I would go fu rther and suggest that it might well provide a whole new worldview, in which human nature (we may revive the concept in a kind of strategic essentialism) is grasped not as good or evil but rather as essentially inefficient. so FREDRIC JAMESON

What we have historically admired as genius is then simply a fo rm of efficiency in which, fo r whatever psychic and social reasons, a figure like Napoleon or Edison has been able to project the ramified and complex consequences of an act of which most of us only grasp its one-dimensional appearance in the present. If so, then we may completely reconstruct the equally one dimensional value of efficiency in new ways which include the fu ture and become properly political rather than ethical or psychological. At any rate, we make a beginning on dismantling the regime of austerity, downsizing, financialization, and the like when we are able to repudiate efficiency in the name of other, even more progressive values. It is a critical reconsideration or refunctioning (Brecht's Umfunktionierung) which can then be extended to the other ideological motifs associated with this one, such as instrumentalization (itself in fact simply the reduction of Aristotle's fourfold notion of causality to the priority of a single one, not inappropriately called "efficientcausalit y").

11.

Even if we succeed in removing the value of efficiency fr om our utopian anxieties, however, the larger issue of creativity remains to be addressed. Efficiency is part of a more elaborate ideological complex which includes issues of progress and change, of inven tion and inventiveness along with their opposite, stagnation; and which indeed ultimately reaches into the very heart of the uncon scious and motivates our well-nigh libidinal commitment to capi talism itself as a system. "Creative destruction" was Schumpeter's excellent word for it, but it is already thoroughly described and indeed eulogized in The CommunistMa nifesto. To be sure, part of this discussion will today have been trans formed (once again) by the existence of the computer, which utterly transforms the nature of labor and its relationship to AN AMERICAN UTOPIA 51 so-called creativity. Labor, to be sure, had already been fu nda mentally transformed, first bythe application of scientificmethods to agriculture (chemical fertilizer) and, concurrently, by the displacement of handicraft by industrial machinery: both "great transformations" in their own right which produced "nature" by relegating it to the past (the fantasy of a return to nature always constituting an imaginary rash the utopian impulse has been eager to scratch). But these twin rectifications of feudal production also strengthened, if they did not themselves produce, the increasingly operative ideology of efficiency, whose role in the next (cybernetic and informational) revolution is less immediately apparent, for it is intersected by that more recent ideology of "immaterial labor," with its insistence on science and "General Intellect" and its pecu liar echo of Marx's diagnosis of the "theological" dimension of the commodity itself. But the social values of efficiency andknowledge are themselves outweighed, in current anti-utopian anxieties, by that of original ity and innovation, particularly as they findtheir fu lfillment in the image of the entrepreneur and the glamor of adventure, risk and "modernity" invested in entrepreneurialism and its ethos. Is the entrepreneur not the very foundation of capitalism as such? I fear not, fo r the career of the entrepreneur falls into two distinct halves, which we then attempt to recombine in the spuri ous notion of the businessman. The first part of the entrepreneur's career is that of the inventor, whether of objects, designs, financial "instruments," bright ideas, strategies, or whatever: this is truly the realm of creativity, and one is always tempted to elevate it to the most stirring avatar of the human, even though there is no human nature and therefore no such norm or value. (There is also skill, for example, which is a rather different"v irtue"-or virtuos ity, as Paolo Virno terms it appropriately.) These vehicles of crea tivity obviously range fr om the crackpots and the obsessed to what the term "genius" has often been applied to, which is to say that it is precisely to be regarded as a form of life rather than a value. 52 FREDRIC JAMESON

Unfo rtunately, the second part of the life of the successful entre preneur is that of the businessman, the exploiter of the invention, of which Edison and Ford (and Disney) give us so many American examples, but one might want to extrapolate that into other lines of work as well, such as the academic specializations. This is a wholly differentmatter, and it no longer means the realm of free dom but reabsorption into the momentum of capital; it leads on into finance and business per se (where there can also be much creativity) and is not to be valorized in and fo r itself (except perhaps in the sense of its own creativity and invention). This is no doubt the realm of unproductive imperialism, and a new space probably has to be opened up fo r it: some new "virtue" we might call management in general; if it could ever be separated fr om money and profit. At any rate, today the bureaucracies are not unified as a fo rce; they are always in the service of something else, whether negative (private business) or positive (social work). They cannot be called upon as an independent force, any more than a garage band could be installed to run a ministry of culture. Indeed, in a consumer society, the entrepreneur is less likely to be a producer but rather something closer to a designer. The nine teenth-century-type inventors, like Edison and even Ford himself, were indeed the forerunners of such a development, which was not obvious at the time inasmuch as their "designs" actually generated new kinds of objects-electricity and its vehicles, the automo bile-which demanded a wholesale expansion of production and the creation of whole new industries, the building of new forms of built space in their factories, and the hiring and training, the trans fo rmation, of a workforce that came from the land (a source of labor that no longer exists-except via immigration). Today, such products saturate the market; what is wanted is a redesign of them such that they supply additional needs and wants (or indeed create them in the first place), like the various extras on luxury cars or indeed the smartphone itself, which is little more than a collection of extras in the first place. This is why the great inventor (Edison, AN AMERICAN UTOPIA 53

Ford, Disney) is supplanted as a capitalist culture hero by the great designer, whose mythic archetype became the sainted Steve Jobs. Genius in this sense, as we shall see later, is essentially the fo retell ing of consequences, the capacity to think ahead and trace out a sequence of events in which a given innovation comes up against an obstacle (not this placement of the thumb on the device!) which can then be prophetically displaced in advance. What is then clear from this development, despite the immense fo rtunes to be made fr om moments in which a space fo r just such new designs (or functional inventions) opens up, is their detacha bility from capitalism itself. Just as invention of the older type does not require monetary rewards (the careers of the great inventors already mentioned always fell into two halves-the inventive one and then the attempt to exploit the new product as a money-making business, something Ford was better at than Edison, fo r example), so also the "genius" for design (which can clearly take on its politi cal forms as well) can be imagined as a motivation and a satisfaction in its own right, not particularly affected in its logic by the rewards a differentkind of socioeconomic system might offer. With the critique of the ideology of efficiency and, beyond that, the virtues we have been trained to associate with free enterprise, we have begun to move into a new and larger terrain, only briefly touched on above, and that is that collective transformation of mentalities we have identified as cultural revolution. If the critique of ideology deals with what Brecht called the good old things, cultural revolution itself has to do with the bad new things. But this is a complicated process in which the new cannot simply replace the old but must develop within it somehow, ultimately discarding the old ways like a husk or shell (as Marx put it). This means moving fr om the plain of doxa, of opinions and stereotypes, of "values," to some deeper level which is no longer that of mere individual psychology but rather the structural one of psychoa nalysis (we will discuss psychoanalysis and its role in political and social analysis in another Excursus, below.) 54 FREDRIC JAMESON

To put it more practically, the proposal must now move from the critique of capitalism and its ideologies to an analysis of the fe ar of utopia. Utopianism must first and fo remost be a diagnosis of the fear of utopia, or of anti-utopianism. The recrudescence and reflowering of dystopias in our present culture suggests deeply rooted anxieties which are a good deal more fu ndamental than the fe ar-mongering widely practiced during the Cold War and expressed in various anti totalitarian tracts such as Orwell's 1984. We have already mentioned the issue of the state and the anxieties it inevitably arouses: in the long run, what we have to do with here is simply the terror of the collective as such, the existential fear of losing our individuality in some vaster collective being. At this point, however, we have to do with a twofold structure of fears and anxieties layered over this more fundamental one: namely, the specific and substantive apprehen sions that attach to the army as a fo rm or to the military as such (and these are empirical as well as fo rmal), and then, at some lower and more general level, the fear of utopia as such. Every psychoanalyst knows (except, apparently, fo r Freud himself, who simply told his patients outright what was the matter with them, in the process indoctrinating them in his own system) that the best treatment fo r neurotics lies in indirection: like the sociologists who draw up their questionnaires by making you think they are inquiring about some thing else, it is best to seem to lead the patients down the wrong path, fr om which "self-knowledge" rises like a distant glimpse or happy accident (assuming there can be knowledge about something-the so-called self-which doesn't exist in the first place). Utopians must proceed like that: they have to concentrate not on visions of future happiness, but rather on treatments of that stubborn resistance we tend to oppose to it and to all the other proposals fo r positive change in this now worldwide society. Utopian thinking must first involve the radical therapy fo r dystopia, its radical treatment and cure; only then can it begin to spin out its own impossible pipe dreams. We hammer away at anti-utopianism not with arguments, but with ther apy: every utopia today must be a psychotherapy of anti-utopian AN AMERICAN UTOPIA 55 fe ars and draw them out into the light of day, where the sad passions like blinded snakes writhe and twist in the open air. More than that, they must be indulged, fo r nothing cures a sad passion as fu lly as its passionate embrace, its wholehearted endorsement. First, though, a symptomatology must be established and tested: I suggest that the empty signifier towhich any number of fears and preoccupations cling, as to a magnet, is the term "free dom," which, following Trotsky (and Kant's terminology), I have suggested to be an amphiboly, in which fo r an empirical reality (wage labor, as the historical negation of bound labor of whatever kind) is substituted a kind of spiritual essence of inde terminate meaning, itself a stand-in fo r that even more indeter minate thing which is consciousness itself. It is clear enough that the omission of the material fact of labor from the henceforth supersensible "value" opens the door to any number of fantasy investments, inevitably of the negative or dystopian kind. But as I indicated above, utopianism is at one with this therapy of the anti-utopian; to use a literary analogy, this kind of cultural revolution is a fo rm which is its own content, like an autoreferen tial work whose subject is its own composition. This is indeed probably the unique feature about revolutions in general as an event: they essentially grapple with their own possibility or impos sibility, unlike the events of daily life or of "normal" history which project their aims beyond and outside themselves in an effort to shape the fu ture or to repeat the past. (Indeed, to insert a gratui tous reference here to another field altogether, it is no doubt in this sense that modernist works are in their autoreferentiality a mime sis of revolution as such, or rather of its afterimage conceived as a kind of ideal event.) Specifically military fears include issues of violence, of hierar chy and discipline, of regimentation, and ultimately of aggressiv ity itself, as that is fantasized to be a fundamental feature of human nature or the human "essence" (feminism has thematized this conception of aggressivity as patriarchy or male violence). It is s6 FREDRIC JAMESON worth reminding the reader that the universal army here proposed is no longer the professional army responsible fo r any number of bloody and reactionary coups d'etat in recent times, whose ruth lessness and authoritarian or dictatorial mentality cannot but inspire horror and whose still vivid memory will certainly astonish anyone at the prospect of entrusting a state or an entire society to its control. Removing such justified and visceral fe ars would certainly be the firsttask of any utopian therapy, were it not fo r the situation of dual power from which the new universal army emerges, which begins life as a parallel fo rce alongside the state and its official army and finds its first tasks, and indeed its vocation, in the fu lfillment of neglected social services and in a coexistence with the population of a wholly different type. The "nation at arms" which emerges fr om this situation is above all a general population in which everyone participates and a principled reac tion against just such enclaves which enjoy Weber's "monopoly of violence" and have come to lead an autonomous life independent of society in general. (Current American reactions against isolated police forces present ready-made analogies.) In recent theory, beginning, I think, with Walter Benjamin's famous essay, there has come to be established a distinction between violence and fo rce. Force is the institutional attribute of entities like the police and the army; it exists invisibly everywhere in daily life in the fo rm of taboos and injunctions and does not have to be manifested physically. Force is the fear and certainty of violence, as Pascal said; more recently, in his discussion of Gram sci, Perry Anderson has compared it to that physical gold which is supposed to back up the claims of paper money to have value in their own right.9 Violence will in that case then, virtually by definition, presup pose the "unlawful" in the fo rm of physical outbreaks which define

9 Perry Anderson, "The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci," New Left Review, no. I/100, November-December 1976. AN AMERICAN UTO PIA 57 their perpetrators as criminals or revolutionaries, or in any case as antisocial elements. As we are seeing today in the case of so-called terrorism, violence is thus an ideology (whose meaning includes consent to its opposite number, namely "force"). I believe that the use of this word should always be subject to ideological analysis in order to determine the political meaning it is inevitably designed to have, whether that be the preservation of order in well-to-do neighborhoods or the propagation of bodily harm and injury in the service of essentially political tactics or strategy. One does not endorse violence by denouncing its ideological fu nction as a pseudo-concept; rather, this unmasking defamiliarization cannot but clarify the situation to be grasped. As fo r the violence of the universal army at issue here, it is prob ably necessary to add that a social order in which everyone is trained in the use of weapons and nobody is allowed to possess them except in limited and carefully specified situations is proba bly a safer society than the one we currently live in, and one in which it might be possible to return to that now idyllic condition in which (such as in the Britain of yesterday) even the police are unarmed. Nonetheless, just as yesterday the business of America was busi ness, so fr om time immemorial the business of the army has been warfare; and perhaps it is disingenuous to argue, as J aures does, fo r a purely defensive army, despite the fact that all projected utopias, real or imagined-from Winstanley's colony on St. George 's Hill to Aldous Huxley's Is land-have had to fe ar the hostility of non utopian neighbors whose interest lay in wiping them out (in Ecotopia, that neighbor is the United States itself, held at bay by the Ecotopians' possession of nuclear weapons). In fact, Utopus himself pursued a cunning and highly Machiavellian fo reign policy-bribing and corrupting his fo reign enemies and hiring mercenaries to neutralize them. The demands of self-defense, fr om the Greeks to Stalin and passing through the French Revolution, have always been the principal undoing of any number of well-intentioned political s8 FREDRIC JAMESON arrangements and their deterioration into paranoid, abusive, and self-destructive conditions, complete with elaborate police fo rces and espionage networks at home and abroad. Indeed, when utopia is diagnosed as the root cause of so-called totalitarianism and terror, it is generally this peril of the effectsof self-preservation that is really at issue. The utopias which do not include this fo reign hostility as an intrinsic fe ature of their planning and indeed of their very exist ence-such utopias, lacking as it were any such utopian fo reign policy, have justified themselves in two ways: one, either, as Winstanley quite reasonably thought, the non-utopian population of a non-utopian outside world, seeing the advantages of the new system, will quickly abandon their regimes and their older states; or, two, we will have taken fo r granted, as Bellamy does, that the rest of the world has at once simultaneously embraced the utopian revolu tion so that no fu rther "foreign policy" need be provided fo r. In the real world, the situation of Cuba is enough to demonstrate the vulnerability of any such enclave-in this case, a socialist state at the very heart of Western capitalism. I have not taken these problems into consideration here, but even their bracketing leaves open the question of military research (atomic weapons and the like). I will only point out how much basic scientific invention and discovery has come from military research and fr om wartime situations (partly because a civilian population-or its government-is unlikely to spend the tax money warfare demands on purely abstract and theoretical peace time research). In the universal army, presumably such lines of demarcation will have disappeared. But even bracketing the ques tion of foreign wars, the daily military routine that makes up the life of a peacetime army must now be addressed, and it raises precisely those issues of hierarchy and discipline which have been included in our general review of properly dystopian fears. One must assume that, as with militias or reserve units, a certain amount of obligatory training would be involved; it might well be combined with a medical regime of prevention and of hygiene, AN AMERICAN UTOPIA 59 particularly in an affluentpopulation blessed with all the problems of leisure, obesity, and luxury consumption. But for the sake of imagination and the contours of the thought experiment, it need not be feared, as Oscar Wilde famously did, that "socialism" would take too many evenings. In a regime of minimal produc tion, such as the one here envisaged, precious weekends need not be sacrificed to military drills and other forms of physical regi mentation or "voluntary labor" (as Trotsky euphemistically put it): such lost hours would be considerably reduced and could be varied according to the specialization allotted to (but also chosen by) the participants. Regimentation and discipline are serious concerns fo r any afflu ent and permissive society like our own, and the threat they seem to pose to our habits and daily life are only exacerbated by the usual ideological confusion around the idea, or at least the slogan, of freedom. Revolutions and revolutionary change generally take place at catastrophic moments (wars, natural disasters) in which the habits of daily life disappear and make place fo r new ways of living and thinking (and when the older state and its institutions already demonstrably "inefficient" and incapable of fu lfilling its population's most basic needs-have also lost their "legitimacy"). Every reasonable person will understand that as social and economic equality becomes more generalized there will necessar ily be a lowering of what are prejudicially termed "living stand ards" fo r the privileged (and not only fo r the rich). The end of World War II in Europe, for example, dramatizes the way in which changes in the work ethic required by reconstruction were accom panied by a certain collective enthusiasm fo r radical social change and innovation as well (a political hope and optimism which, to be sure, rapidly waned as capitalism was set back in place). Any convincing thought experiment needs to take such factors into consideration; the role played in such objections by our stereo types of work and leisure need to be discussed in the larger context of a more general cultural revolution. 6o FREDRIC JAMESON

As fo r the universal army, however, the association of armies in general with some deep-seated aggressivity in human nature, or perhaps more specifically in some gendered human nature, are of a different type: this is essentialism with a vengeance, and it emerged most dramatically not only in the resistance to the Vietnam War but in the popular explanations fo r our engagement in it, attributed to the innate male aggressivity of Johnson and his advisors and generals. This is obviously not a particularly materi alist explanation, let alone a historical one. On the other hand, the widespread adoption of political strategies of nonviolence is certainly an index of ideological as well as tactical concern; and Callenbach feeds into this general ideological conviction in his sixties' utopia when he describes an annual ceremony of War Games fo r the collective letting off of steam of the males of this society (whose government is largely staffedby women). In fact, if it is aggressivity as a character trait that is in question here, I would raise some doubt as to whether the machismo of the warrior is much different fr om that of the great businessman, who used indeed to be called a "robber baron" but whose predatory instincts must necessarily be developed and nurtured at an early age if he or she is to be a success in the competitive world of business today (which is to say, today again, the world of high finance rather than the old proverbial "small business"). In our current situation, far less inclined, it seems to me, to such essentialist views of gender and human nature, it certainly seems clear that the excitement of military action and aggressivity is a more economic and genera tional matter, attracting unemployed youth to local paramilitary adventure of a paying and valued type, whether in the Mideast or Northern Ireland, Los Angeles gangs or South American guerril las. William James's famous remark about the moral equivalent of war has of course inspired any number of thinkers to invent equiv alents fo r such lethal remedies fo r unemployment and its boredom and loss of any sense of personal worth; but revolutions are also notoriously made by young people. AN AMERICAN UTOPIA

A final motive fo r anti-utopian resistance, particularly in the area of armies, military service, and the like, must be sought fo r in a deeper place, which is neither a psychological nor a metaphysical one, I would argue, but very much an instantiation of Sartre 's famous conclusion: Hell is other people. It is an originary trauma which explains the fu nction of small groups as protection and which, no doubt, few enough of us are willing to face directly. Those who do have often reached the sobering assessment that the human species is a particularly loathsome biological entity, and this very much owing to its individuality (and freedom) rather than its lack of it. (The idea that humans are naturally good and altruistic is then a secondary corrective to this first metaphysical reaction.) This is why the rich are primarily motivated not by power or pleasure, but by the possibility of radical isolation, of separating themselves off, by way of bodyguards, private prop erty, walls, and the like, fr om their fellow men (and women). If this speculative generalization has any merit, it can also explain why the most visceral negative reaction to the very notion of the army, the very prospect of being involved with it in one way or another, has little enough to do with warfare and physical violence: It stems fr om the fact that the army is virtually the only institution in modern society whose members are obliged to asso ciate with all kinds of people on an involuntary, non-elective basis, beginning with social class as such. This fo rced association, initially restricted to males, has been a useful mechanism, in the age of nationalism and the modern nation-state, fo r securing a certain collective unification and leveling (including the imposi tion of a national language). So the army is the first glimpse of a classless society, with all the anxieties such a novel social situation has historically (and inevita bly) aroused. But class is mediated by a more concrete level of experience, such as gender and the incompatibility of personali ties, the distaste we all have fo r certain other kinds of people and their behavior. That level is initially one of a Bourdieu-type FREDRIC JAMESON

"distinction" and is experienced at firstas an educational and class disparity; obvious enough, in the case of gender (for we have spec ified our universal army as one that no longer functions according to sexual differentiation), the incompatibilities are immeasurably older, not to say primordial, and the discomfort of fo rced interac tion of a purely social type all the more painful (for the male ego, fo r instance). (I will come back to other, seemingly more superfi cial psychic incompatibilities later on.) There is probably also some first unformulated notion of violence at work here, which only later gets reorganized in physical fo rm and becomes a source of fear and of the so-called instinct of self-preservation. This expe rience of social promiscuity, however, is what democracy really means (let's try to avoid that tainted word in the future) and what every utopia must entail: it is species-being, to use Marx's phrase, and to learn its experience and to undergo its pedagogies is perhaps the deepest meaning of the term "cultural revolution," as that designates the transition fr om one mode of production to another. On the whole, and except fo r war movies (and wars still pursued under conscription), Americans do not readily understand that other function of the army so well known to Europeans: a nonmili tary function which is essentially social in nature and is calculated to serve as a vehicle fo r the fr aternization of classes. This is, if you like, a utopia of classlessness, provided you understand that in a purely symbolic sense: fo r it does not abolish social classes alto gether by way of some new social structure, but simply suspends it for the duration of the service (or of the war itself). This forced intermingling of the social classes, or at least of their male members, then turns out to have a somewhat different effect than the one imagined fo r some genuinely classless or communist utopia, and that is a national or nationalist one. Before the standardization of the European languages-the elimination of local languages and dialects by legislation, school ing, and the media-the melting pot of military service enforced the hegemony of the official state language and reduced the now AN AMERICAN UTOPIA provincial languages to secondary status and to the level of local accents. The fo rced movement of provincials such as the Bretons or the Sicilians to the great national centers then instills, if not patriotism, then at least a sense of the geographic centrality of power and of their own national marginality. To be sure, this outsider status can also under the right circumstances be a source of power, as in the implantation of Mafia-like networks. In any case, what is produced by this function of military service is the nation itself, and it has little enough to do with warfare as such: the current proposal posits a functional transformation-a Brechtian refunctioning or Umfunktionierung-in which this fo rced class promiscuity becomes the production of genuine class lessness and social leveling. Language is the most delicate fe ature of this process; one can only point to the polyglot practice of the eastern Mediterranean as a model fo r a multilingual existence which acknowledges the necessity for some sort of lingua fr anca without the kind of wholesale dialectal extinction (or linguicide) practiced by the older nation-states in their heydays. For Americans-their dialects already standardized by the media-the closest experience to this kind of social "melting pot" will have been the school, particularly as epitomized in the undis tinguished genre of the high-school movie, in which a variety of social types intermingle and in which the presence of the other sex usefully augments the unisexuality of the Other, more European military model, fo regrounding this ultimate utopian frontier as a problem yet to be solved. In any case, what both these models underscore, and it is an essential fe ature of any utopian construction or imaginative oper ation and too often fo rgotten in the conventional stereotype of utopia as an edulcorated conflict-free zone of social peace and harmony, is the necessarily antagonistic nature of individual life and experience in a classless or communist society. "Classless" in this context means the elimination of collective antagonism and thereby, inevitably, the heightening of individual ones. The FREDRIC JAMESON absence of any serious attempt, in the standard utopian tradition, to imagine what kind of literature might be produced and consumed in a communist utopia testifies to this unhappy and inveterate lapse in the utopian imagination. In Ivan Efremov's Andromeda (1957), fo r example, only the great natural disasters, such as the loss of a spaceship carrying thousands of people, count as literary material; while in William Morris's Ne ws From No where (as also in Bellamy's Looking Backward) it is the pangs of thwarted love (and the passionate dramas resulting fr om it) that almost exclusively people the "greatest literary achievements [sic]" of those imagined worlds. But can anyone seriously believe that the visceral dislike one individual sometimes feels fo r another will disappear fr om a perfect world? Or that rivalry will disappear fr om the younger generations, no matter what kind of rewards are substituted fo r sheer cash and profit? Or, indeed, and far more seriously, that generational conflict will not perpetually threaten social reproduction (including the perpetuation of the utopian system itself)? Or, finally-for it has been a central point in many of the analyses here-that envy-the obsession with the theft of "enjoyment" (jouissance)-will somehow cease to torment those incomplete biological individuals we are and will not cease to be, even in "paradise"? The high-school film, then-with all the unpleasantness of its various group bondings, its competitions, its hazing and its exclu sions, indeed its unmotivated fr iendships and enmities, the forms it presents of Kant's "radical evil" or "pathological" inclinations the high-school drama will come to be acknowledged as a reveal ing expression of the deepest utopian impulses and the reality principle associated with them. This is the bittersweet parable of a world from which material needs and wants have been somehow removed (and satisfied), and a time from which necessary labor has been suspended. This is a fo retaste of the society projected by Lenin in his own utopia, State and Revolution, in which "socialist legality" is enforced informally, as a collective habit: AN AMERICAN UTOPIA 6s

For when all have learned the art of administration, and will indeed independently administer social production, will independently keep accounts, control the idlers, the gentlefolk, the swindlers and similar "guardians of capitalist traditions," the escape from this national accounting and control will inevitably become so increas ingly difficult, such a rare exception, and will probably be accompa nied by such swift and severe punishment (for the armed workers are practical men and not sentimental intellectuals and they will scarcely allow anyone to trifle with them), that very soon the neces sity of observing the simple, fu ndamental rules of human inter course will become a habit.10

Indeed, there is something of a shock when one passes fr om the momentary disorder of the classic "crime of passion" in Morris's Victorian utopia to Le Guin's account of physical violence in The Dispossessed (where Shevek is beaten up by another man who simply resents his use of the same-computer-derived name). I give these instances not to glorify the vigilantes or fist fightsbut rather simply to dispel our instinctive fear that "utopia" (in whatever fo rm) will be a place without conflictor contradic tion-though it is true that Lenin evokes the common sense of "any crowd of civilized people, even in modern society," which as a matter of course "parts two people who are fighting, or inter feres to prevent a woman fr om being assaulted" (340). At any rate, I think it is as a warning against such idyllic expectations aroused by a non-conflictual stereotype of the "classless" utopia that Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have insistently expressed their conviction that all societies are founded on antag onism, an insistence which has predictably enough been taken as a repudiation of notions of class and class struggle as such.ll

10 V.I. Lenin, Essential Wo rks of Lenin, New Yo rk: Bantam, 1996, 349. 11 Ernest Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: To wards a Radical Democratic Politics, London: Verso, 1985. 66 FREDRIC JAMESON

Perhaps we here need some quasi-Maoist distinction between antagonistic and non-antagonistic antagonisms in order to assure ourselves that a classless society is not to be fantasized as lacking antagonisms of all kinds, which is to say, lacking in the dilemma of the Other as such. Hobbes thought the fundamental emotion fr om which society as an institution drew its legitimation was fear; and no doubt, in the context of the English Revolution, through which he lived, the immediate reference, and relevance, of this confession lay in the prospect of outright physical danger, fr om marauding troops to looters and antisocial elements of all kinds. But the deeper mean ing of the insight comes, I think, from precisely this primordial fear of the Other, and above all in its fo rm as other people, in species promiscuity and the bewilderment of the swarm. Paradoxically, but not undialectically, the other fu ndamental fo rm taken by this fear of the Other is very precisely the entity Hobbes endorsed to defend himself against that first one, namely the state itself, in its multiple fo rms as bureaucracy, as court of appeal in last instance, as sheer power and a kind of depersonalized historical subject findingits ultimate jouissance in the crushing of individuals, as in the fantasies of a Kafka or, at a lesser level, an Orwell. It is hard to say whether the proliferation of ideologies of power in our time-essentially, as in the care of its leading spokes person, Michel Foucault, a thematics calculated to displace the economic and to divert politics into more sterile, if possibly more satisfying, directions-is the cause or the effect of such an obses sion with the state itself. It will be said that the wars of the twenti eth century are explanation enough fo r this terror of the state, but they did not happen in a void. One may well prefer the attitude of Horkheimer, who famously observed, "He has nothing useful to say about fascism who is unwilling to mention capitalism." At any rate, this fixation has been discussed sufficiently in our earlier Excursus on the political as such. Perhaps, then, this is the moment to insert a second Excursus on the recourse to psychoanalytic AN AMERICAN UTOPIA doctrines in the context of utopian speculations explicitly designed to deal with the collective rather than the individual.

Excursus II: On Psychology and Psychoanalysis

I have often enough quoted Durkheim's injunction-whenever a social fact is explained psychologically, we may be sure that the explanation is wrong-to find myself obliged to add that this authoritative pronouncement was not meant to endorse the reifica tion of the "social fact" Durkheim advocates, but merely to discredit the claims of psychology as an amalgam of essentially individual observations about motivation, habit, mentality, or behavior (let alone psycho-physical experiment, which seems to be returning in the form of neuropsychology). Collective phenom ena cannot be conceptualized as a receptacle containing innumer able individual psychologies any more than they can be attributed to some super-individual "collective consciousness." Meanwhile, Freud's one incursion into this area-Group Psychology and the Analysisof the Eg o-turned out to be a lamentable reinforcement of Gustave Le Bon's conservative terror of the mob by way of some of the more doubtful psychoanalytic hypotheses such as "identification." The great empirical observers and theoreticians of psychology-La Rochefoucauld, Gracian, Machiavelli-were in fact, as this last name indicates, essentially political thinkers, who tended to apply military and strategic concepts to their social recommendations at the same time that they shrewdly compiled satiric lists of the character types involved in such social maneuvers. At its best, then, psychology can function as a system of charac terology: qua science, better than astrology (with which of course it has some connections) but not as respectable as astronomy. Freud said character was destiny, or at any rate, he sharply distin guished between character-the fidgetingor choleric, the treacly 68 FREDRIC JAMESON

or subservient person before us-and neurosis. You can treat the latter, but the fo rmer will stay on, except perhaps fo r the momen tous impacts of extreme situations and the secular miracles of conversion. For many of us it will be difficultto mark some abso lute break here: Surely character in this (psychological or even literary) sense will have been geologically fo rmed in some early "psychoanalytic" crisis? But psychology at its best will simply be a catalogue of such later and now fairly hardened fo rmations, which may well be organized into cultural systems but which are scarcely the object of what is so often called science. Daily life (and traditional literature) is taken up with the negotiations between such "characters": psychoanalysis with the structure of the individual desire. The theoreticians of psychoanalysis have always argued at length and in various ways fo r the radical differentiation of their "science" fr om that of psychology; it is unnecessary to recapitulate those debates here, nor even to ruminate obsessively on the nature of science. But as most of the references and concepts drawn on here in passing are Lacanian in origin, it will be useful to explain their advantages, if not to endorse or defend Lacanianism as such. We may begin by observing that Marxism has what seems to be its own psychological concepts, whose fu nction is then to mediate between base and superstructure, or, if you prefer, to account fo r the ways in which the economic-or, in other words, class positionality articulates its dynamics on the cultural level. The predominant entity which secures this articulation is clearly enough what is called ideology; but increasingly, in late Marxism, another fo rce (already theorized by Marx) has come to play a significant role in Marxian social analysis, and that is commodification, or commodity reifica tion (most notably exemplified in current societies in the fo rm of consumerism, in a situation in which Lenin's rather hasty notion of the bribery of the working class has tended more and more to be replaced by more clinical concepts like that of addiction, which in fact fu nction in much the same "psychological" way). AN AMERICAN UTOPIA

So a first theoretical problem is therewith at once established: whether the notion of ideology is not itself a psychological one, and if not, what psychoanalysis might usefully have to tell us about it. In the present context, a third consideration becomes inescapa ble: namely, what role either can be called on to play in cultural revolution. Some history may be appropriate here. The theoretical polemics of the 1960s (using this term gener ically rather than chronologically-the latter would prolong our period into the mid- or late 1970s) can be summed up as a twin onslaught on metaphysics and on idealism-two related philosophical pathologies, to be sure, both of them most conveniently characterized as ideologies (we will leave ideal ism to the side in the present discussion). For ideology itself, like its ancestor, metaphysics, can always be identified by the implicit or explicit promise to answer one of two questions which are ultimately the same. The first is the question about the meaning of nature, while the second is that of the meaning of human nature. Neither of these entities exists, as construc tivist philosophy at least as old as Nietzsche (and Sartre) has demonstrated; therefore neither has anything like a meaning, assuming that even that term, so applied, has any meaning. Questions about the meaning oflife itself as a biological process belong in the realm of the question about nature; and it may be suspected that origin questions in this area, seemingly scien tific since the collapse of theology, still conceal a metaphysical dimension. Meanwhile, all of Nietzsche's diagnoses of the so-called will to power (or, in other words, the social and prag matic-ideological-uses of seemingly neutral facts and theo ries) can generally be invoked to discredit the various "psycho logical" discoveries about human consciousness or behavior (including, to be sure, their alleged ethical implications). All these metaphysical and ideological exhibits, however, once again become productive when one grasps them from a histori cal perspective, as social and historical symptoms. 70 FREDRIC JAMESON

The significanceof the Althusserian movement was then to have thematized the attack on metaphysics-in a kind of search-and destroy offensive which tracked its enemy into the most unlikely corners, with often deadly results-in two fundamental fo rms: humanism and historicism. In hindsight we can identify these targets as fo llows: Humanism designates a concept of human nature, one which on the one hand expressed bourgeois and Western values, and on the other asserted-against present-day constructivism-that this (bourgeois) human nature was some how eternal and permanently defined the speciesas such. Clearly the term can mean many things and was often also, in a related usage, associated with philanthropy and a moralizing politics intent in the long run on avoiding violence. The first of these features was elaborated by Michel Foucault in his complacently perverse view of the way "humane" practices, in medicine and in the penal system, began to replace ritualistic violence and exclu sion after the bourgeois revolution. The second feature, the nonviolence associated with Gandhi and Martin Luther King, was taken to be a strategic rebuke to revolutionaries as such, inasmuch as social and Marxist revolutions, with their slogan of class strug gle, were taken to be indissociable fr om violence. (Sartre 's rather awkward intervention, "Existentialism is a humanism," was meant to distinguish the politics of the left fr om a fascism and Nazism then only recently defeated, as well as to promote a conception of freedom utterly distinct fr om an American Cold War rhetoric of free elections and to underscore the necessity of political commit ment. This kind of polemic then clearly muddies the waters and makes any really clear-cut critique of the term "humanism" a space of contradictory cross-currents, particularly inasmuch as a reli gious and right-wing fundamentalism was also intent on attacking "h umamsm. " as a " go dl ess " at h e1sm. . ) As fo r historicism, I believe that in the beginning it was associ ated with the Second International belief in an inevitable historical movement toward socialism, or in other words what Benjamin AN AMERICAN UTOPIA denounced as "progress" and what heretical currents on the left detected as a Stalinist rhetoric of "historical inevitability": one which encouraged passivity and blind trust in the Party and tended to greet independent revolutionary activism with the greatest suspicion, denouncing it in terms of voluntarism and "bad sponta neity," which of course much of it was. The slogan that the time was not ripe or that the situation was objectively not yet a revolu tionary one obviously reinforced these positions and called fo rth a critique of historical telos that, in hindsight, had equal disadvan tages. Althusser's own version of the slogan, that "history has neither a subject nor a telos," could then be enlisted in attacks on party organization in general and also (particularly later on, after 1989) called on to reinforce the unconscious Thatcherite convic tion that history was not going anywhere and that alternatives were impossible. In hindsight, this attack on historicism had even graver consequences fo r left and Marxist theory than the denun ciation of humanism, which might well be revived in a new and more historically nuanced, "postmodern" way, as I will try to show here. The attack on historicism, however, tended to discredit any fo rms of histo'rical perspective (those well-known "grand narratives" to be conscientiously avoided), and thereby to blind us to the ways in which anti-historicism could itself be taken as a symptom of the late-capitalist experience of historical temporality and used to support the capitalist ideological doctrine of that "end of history" which had already been promoted as "the end of ideol ogy" and indeed the end of class struggle as such. As a symptom, the critique of historical inevitability (which finally casts doubt not only on the inevitability of socialism but even on its very possibil ity) cannot be adequately treated by simple counterarguments or reaffirmations of history as such; even the remarkable revival and new efflorescenceof Marxian analyses of capitalism and its contra dictions remains oddly fixated on an impossible present without any visible historical fu ture, save catastrophe. Rather, genuinely historical thinking can only be revived by a stimulation of 72 FREDRIC JAMESON speculative images of the future and of perspectives of social change and alternate societies, something which now and fo r the moment only takes place under the banner of utopianism. The fu ndamental fu nction of utopianism today, in other words, lies in this seemingly paradoxical revival of a sense of the future with which the ostentatiously "unrealistic" posture of the utopian tradi tion would seem decidedly at odds. We will return to the political fu nctions of utopia later on. What it is appropriate to affirm hereis that the older slogans of anti-humanism and anti-historicism both need to be renewed (as an ideological task) and corrected by a revision, in terms of which the fundamental targets of critique are identified as psychologism and culture critique. The revision clearly enough reflects that shift fr om base to superstructure which we have previously empha sized; in other words, it implies some general consensus on the contradictory structure of the infrastructure, of capitalism itself as a mode of production wracked with debilitating and destructive contradictions and ultimately unviable, at the same time that it proposes a shift in the direction of culture and subjectivity, which do seem more accessible to change and a more accessible target fo r the critiques of intellectuals. But if these critiques do not return to the base itself and articulate new ways in which an anticapitalist praxis can be invented, then they remain sterile, and indeed that sterility is itself the result of the fu ndamental philosophical flaw Durkheim insisted on at the very birth of sociology as a discipline (without offering any truly alternative mode of analysis of the type such as that available in Marxism and the dialectic), namely that any psychological analysis of collective phenomena is in advance bound to be wrong. The culture critique indeed is constituted fo rmally by isolating this or that psychological trait ("the culture of narcissism") or this or that psychiatric diagnostic category (Ruth Benedict's classifica tion of cultures as paranoid or schizophrenic) and unifying a set of social observations around it as their fundamental cause AN AMERICAN UTOPIA 73

"ultimately determining instance." Social change is then predi cated on the order of the "cure," a pseudo-utopian illusion if there ever was one and a prospect hotly debated even within the psycho analytic tradition. Even traditional notions of ideology-particu larly those which opposed ideology to truth or science (without even bothering to distinguish these two arenas: the one existential, the other epistemological)-assumed in Enlightenment fashion that some fo rm of class pedagogy would be enough to disabuse supporters or adherents of the system. But the emergence of a generalized cynicism in our own time is enough to discredit this conception of politics as rhetoric or persuasion, even though the very notion of cynicism itself (launched in a rather different context by Peter Sloterdijk in his book on Weimar) risks slipping into just such a psychological trait or entity, into just such a"culture critique," at issue here. This is then the moment to enunciate several Lacanian concepts which seem useful in any contemporary political analysis. They are: 1) the structural fo rce of gravity of the Other; 2) the theft of enjoyment (jouissance) ; and 3) the permanence of social antago nism on an individual level, or perhaps it would be better to say the disappearance of any concept of normality, the view of society as an ineradicable collection of neurotics. The primacy of desire in Freud remained essentially personal, and included the "otherness" of the family in a merely causal fashion. Lacan was able to insert otherness into the heart of Freud's pathbreaking conception of desire, and to offer a picture of desire fr om which the presence of the Other-big or small-is never absent, so that in a sense, or rather in all possible senses, individual desire is the desire of the Other, is the Other's desire. This socialization of desire itself now at one stroke renders the attempts to build a bridge between Freud and Marx, between the two great scientific discoveries which char acterize modernity, unnecessary. For now the psyche is already essentially social, and the existence of the Other is at the very heart of the libidinal, just as all our social passions are already drenched 74 FREDRIC JAMESON

in the psychic. But we must grasp the originality of this view, whose power is negative rather than positive, fo r the universal envy which is necessarily at the heart of all social life is not some positive desire, but is rather envy of thejouissance or satisfaction of the Other. "Envy," said Thomas Aquinas, "is sorrow fo r another's good." We findit at work, fo r example, in that dilemma of federal ism to which I referred earlier, fo r it is not some basely materialist matter when I mourn the mineral wealth and fertility of another's region in comparison to my own barren soil, or when I resent the transfer of my own wealth and prosperity to a less favored neigh bor in my commonwealth: rather, both these matters of material inequality are mediated and transmitted, indeed fo rmed at the very outset, by my profound awareness of the theft ofjouissance by the Other. Indeed, no doubt when we look back at the class-based societies of human prehistory, it is very much just such envy of jouissance that is at stake in class conflict and class struggle: my justifiedrage at thejouissance of the masters, and their own, seem ingly more subtle resentment of my collective solidarity, my phys ical strength, my proximity to the earth and to nature, to real work, real life, and the body itself. The fu ndamental superiority of Lacanian doctrine over the multitude of other psychoanalyses on offer, including Freud 's original one, lies in the way it grasps the Other as being structur ally internal to subjectivity itself: the problem with such a fo rmu lation remains of course the word "internal," which immediately restores a distinction between the inside and the outside, the self and what is exterior to it, a distinction which was to have been not avoided or eluded, but rather preempted in the first place. Until we reach late Lacan and the drives, all of Lacan is surely to be located here, in this dilemma of the Other, which Lacan inher ited from Sartre and which is embodied in everything from the father to language itself, from the social to my own most inti mate desires (which are those of the Other, using the genitive in all its ambiguity here), from das Ding to my own neurotic AN AMERICAN UTOPIA 75 attempts to square this impossible circle. This is scarcely the place to map out such an intricate system, but only to observe that here the stereotypical (and ideological) opposition between "the individual" and "society" cannot obtain, since the two are inseparable in an inextricable dialectic of identity and difference. To put it methodologically, where in other systems the operation of transcoding is unavoidable-we must pass fr om a language of subjective or psychological individuality to a very different terminology governing the social or the collective (a passage involving a mediation I tend to describe in terms of a translation process )-here transcoding is unnecessary and the same code can apply to either reality. Thus where fo r Freud, in Group Dy namics and the Analysis of the Ego, the superego is somehow outside the self, in the fo rm of the dictator and object of fascina tion he constitutes, here the Lacanian Big Other is within subjec tivity, constituting it fu lly as much as it might be seen to influ ence it; nor is it some projection of my private desires, as when the Leader somehow symbolically resolves my own oedipal trau mas (as fo r Erickson). Here the "ideal ego" and the "ego ideal" are separated by little more than a grammatical inversion; and the two fu ndamental political points I here try to make by way of an essentially Lacanian terminology are individual and collec tive, psychological and sociological, at one and the same time. Psychologically they might have been named envy and aggres sivity, which would, as we have already seen, have at once intro duced some notion of human nature back into the societal or utopian picture. Now, however, that contamination is unnecessary, and the "theft ofjoui ssance" may serve as a structural or ontologi cal synonym fo r the psychological property of envy at the same time that it generalizes the phenomenon and grounds it in my unavoidable relationship to the Other and to that "life fo rce" (or death drive) Lacan callsjouissance. (Whether this term reinvents a vitalist metaphysics or succeeds in escaping metaphysics alto gether is another question that cannot be dealt with here, save to FREDRIC JAMESON observe that Lacan's is not a philosophy as such but rather, as in Freud and Marx, in a unity of theory and practice.) The essential point to be made here is thatjouissance cannot be satisfied and that therefore this lack, as a permanent feature of the human condition, is a perpetual invitation to an ontological and cultural envy of the Other that can be expressed in fo rms that range fr om Gombrowicz' s "immaturity" (the others are grown-ups, I am not) all the way to the bloodiest civil wars. From this condition-which is neither an emotion nor a politi cal motivation, but rather a structural possibility and an existential fact-to the more generalized conviction about "antagonism" there is but a philosophical step, fo r antagonism simply denies the possibility of the "cure," whether societal or individual. It denies the possibility of social harmony, whose peaceful regulation was promised, fo r example, by the various systems of democracy (but also offeredby Hobbes's sovereign), thereby opening a path to the construction of a utopian social order that embraces antagonism as such, although perhaps not in so mechanical a way as in Callenbach' s War Games. Or better still, as has been suggested above, it excludes the aims and projects of political theory altogether and allows human relationships to develop in other ways. Freud's therapeutic practice was based on the conviction that within his society and among that largely normal and fu nctioning population, there existed individuals whose psychic mechanisms were blocked or deregulated to the point of making a fu nctioning and productive daily life difficult or impossible. Freudianism then proposed an explanation fo r such malfunctioning and, in many or most cases, a method fo r treating it. In the Lacanian system, taking it as a conceptual system rather than a set of techniques, it is no longer possible to hold this view of a relatively normal society. The internal presence of the Other, which constitutes each of us and ensures our individuality and indeed our consciousness, is not something that can be cured in that sense; it is something with which each of us come to terms in AN AMERICAN UTOPIA 77 our own existential way (even though our societies and cultures continue to propose and to attempt to enforce traditional "solu tions" or conventional ethical guidelines). This means that every one is neurotic in the psychoanalytic sense and that society, of whatever type, cannot but be a collection of neurotics of various kinds, whose cohabitation can never be regulated in some harmo nious or utopian fashion. Lacan's politics-whether you want to call them pessimistic, cynical, or tragic-reflect this conviction; and this is why to whatever fo rm of Lacanian doctrine we adopt must be added the collective practice of a Fourieresque and utopian model which aims to draw its productivity fr om whatever macro or microassemblages of human neurotics seem forthcoming. What is, however, unavoidably suggested in the standard culture-critical diagnoses is the secret hope that knowledge will in one way or another bring about a cure of its own and enact epistemological therapies: that awareness of the impossibility of any resolution to this structural relationship to the Other will ultimately lead us to some new place of being, some wisdom of the superman or the posthuman presently unimaginable fo r us and thereby unavailable. It would be the alternate wisdom of cynicism to be able to live without this secret hope at the heart of all diagnosis: perhaps the utopians have fo und a way to do that.

12.

The more properly anti-utopian objections to utopia clearly incor porate many of the antimilitary prejudices on a higher or more general level, where they mainly take the fo rm of the various anti socialisms and anticommunisms. Burke 's immortal counterrevo lutionary statement was powered by a twofold passion: on the one hand, it becomes clear, when read and examined closely, that his attacks on the J acobins and their policies were in fact early critiques of capitalism as such (historically, the first powerful critiques of FREDRIC JAMESON capitalism arose on the right, fr om a defeated aristocracy, before they were appropriated and developed by a then still nascent left). We may leave these aside. His other stance had to do with time itself and the passing of the old traditional institutions, as well as the hubris of the revolutionary attempt to construct altogether new ones of a purely human fabrication. Contemporary construc tivism refutes this in a twofold way, both by insisting on the mirage of traditionalism of a past of transcendental and nonhuman origin ("the invention of tradition," Hobsbawm famously called it) and by glorying in production itself and the human capacity to create its own societies, its own contexts and ecosystems. It is a confi dence that might well be tempered by a conviction of human incompetence and ignorance; but we must also make a place in our utopia for the passion fo r stability and continuity, fo r Heideggerian dwelling and the security of the land, alongside the delight in acceleration, the new, creative destruction, and perpetual move ment. I think that any properly global utopia ought to include immense vacations of displacement, in which the populations of whole cities-New Yo rk and Shanghai fo r example-swap homes and places fo r a time (this would be the utopian correction for the present-day new industry of commodified tourism), but that city dwellers, prone to novelty, should also leave room fo r the land itself and deep time, fo r the metaphysical illusions of some human incorporation into nature itself (even when the latter has ceased to exist). We need not, I think, spend any fu rther time on the ideological conjunction of utopia with totalitarianism; far more serious is the danger of civil war always inherent in any such attempt to combine the global with the local-the ideologically narrow way in which political theory conceives of federalism. We do not have to enumerate the latter's causalities of federalism in the modern era-Yugoslavia, Spain, Canada, even the Soviet Union itself-to realize how delicate are all such balancing acts, which must avoid the predominance of one province over all the others at the same AN AMERICAN UTOPIA 79 time that they resist fr agmentation and dissolution. The nation was always the sign of the failure of such utopian federalism; there can be no doubt that even the military network we have designed to escape the geographical confinesof national or state boundaries in a new way will still be menaced by the rivalry of, say, richer army bases and poorer ones. This is indeed where the Lacanian notion of the theft ofjouissancecomes into play as a historical diag nosis: one can envy industrious populations just as passionately as one can despise lazy and pleasure-seeking ones. Add to this the deeper economic level of geography and raw materials, and indeed the more material resentment of the redistribution of wealth and the investment of tax revenues fr om the prosperous provinces to pay the expenses of underdeveloped ones, and you have a dilemma of a multidimensional kind fo r which no ready-made solution exists. More's solution-to make all the subdivisions of his utopia equal in all respects-is a mechanical one, which casts some doubt on the equally mechanical uniformity of its citizens. Federalism is the central political problem of any utopia, using the word "politi cal" in some new sense which is neither internal nor external and which might therefore be just as appropriately replaced by the word "ontological."

13.

This is now the moment to introduce, if not a utopian solution to the dilemma of federalism, then perhaps-in a Lacanian spirit-a utopian nonsolution to it. It is the moment to complete what some might consider the fu ndamentally pessimistic or even cynical Lacanian view of the impossibility of the social-the permanence of antagonism, the ontologically unavoidable conflict with the (nonexistent) Other-with a differentvision of society fo r which its essential elements and building blocks are not individuals but groups. 8o FREDRIC JAMESON

This is the extraordinary perspective of Charles Fourier, gran diose and ludicrous all at once, the unlikely thinker of an impossi ble thought. The madness of his project-for madness is a requi site of any seriously utopian thinker-lies in the mathematical obsessions he shares with Lacan: less, to be sure, with some belief in the scientific objectivity or ideological innocence of the mathe matical fo rmula or matheme than in the inexhaustible genius of mathematical permutations and the well-nigh infinite number of sets, groups, and combinations thereby demonstrated. Fourier is no doubt a psychologist, but on the order of La Rochefoucauld rather than the experimental scientists, a Nietzsche without the genealogical interests. No more than those empirical observers do his psychological observations presuppose some concept or essence of human nature, unless it lie in the assumption that human beings and their psychological makeups have no real essence apart fr om the groups of which they are the parts and organs (and to which, in any utopian system, they ideally ought to belong). Barthes reduced Fourier's psychological makeups to three types or passions, which give something of the flavor of his insights (which Engels compared to those of the great satirists like Moliere): these are the butterflypassion (something like an attention deficiency, in which one becomes fixated on one passionate interest after another), the cabbalistic passion, a kind of delight in intrigue and in combining individuals in various conspiracies, and the compos ite personality, in which the dominant fe ature is not this or that content, but enthusiasm itself and its powerful and shifting commit ments. What is crucial is not this particular account of the human drives, which it would be delightful to combine with Lacanian neuroses and libidinal structures, but rather the fact of the group combinations themselves into which these various passions can productively interact and fo rm their social molecules. Fourier's notion of harmony expresses the conviction that no matter how frustrated and unfulfilled, no matter how neurotic, hysterical, or compulsive, there will always be a collective combination in which AN AMERICAN UTOPIA the individual bearer of the sad passion in question, of the desper ate or antisocial loner, the anorexic or bulimic of desire, the manic convert to ever new and equally unfulfillable hobbies and pastimes, will find relief. Just as Bellamy is the tutelary deity of the universal army and its infrastructure, so Fourier becomes that of a realm of freedom, of culture and its superstructures, and to my mind the only thinker who has thus far discovered the way fo r a collectivity or a multiplicity to coordinate the ineradicable individualities which make it up. Fourier's "calculus of passions" was a prodi gious architectonic which aimed not at repressed potentially anti social drives and feelings, but rather at harmonizing them in such a way that the negatives became productive. One might argue that his system constitutes the grain of truth at the heart of market ideology, as in Mandeville's Fable of the Bees, in which even the most excessive vices and luxuries make the market go round. So here Fourier's delirious yet sober and calculating imagination puts even Spinoza's "sad passions" to use as the cogs and wheels of a lively, ever-changing, self-perpetuating utopia. Today no utopia is viable that promises Thomas More's monasticism or the left puri tanism of so many modern revolutionary traditions: rather it must necessarily aim at reducing the inevitable repressions-libidinal as well as security-oriented-that any society interiorizes in order to cohere. The new utopia, indeed, must welcome the most outra geous self-indulgences and personal freedoms of its citizens in all things, very much including puritanism and the hatred of self indulgence and personal freedoms. It is Fourier who squares this circle, and this is why, alongside a decentralization scattered across its space like the distinctive city-states of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, we must also imagine the emergence of a new kind of institution, destined to supplant traditional government and its agencies and to articulate the superstructural or cultural level of our new society in a post- or trans-Fourieresque spirit. We may provisionally call this new institution the Psychoanalytic Placement Bureau, and it will, in conjunction with unimaginably FREDRIC JAMESON complex computer systems, handle and organize all forms of employment as well as all manner of personal and collective thera pies. Mediating between the individual and the collective (you may insert innumerable familiar structures and groups in between them), the new institution will combine the functions of a union and a hospital, an employment officeand a court, a market research agency, a polling bureau, and a social welfare center. Presumably what is left of the police as an institution will eventually be absorbed into this central agency, which will eventually replace government and political structures equally, the state thereby withering away into some enormous group therapy. But is this not precisely the political as such? The return of the old centralizing state as the inevitable and necessary mediation between base and superstructure, the arbiter of conflicts of all kinds, the organizer of labor and distributor of its tasks, the very locus of what used to be called bureaucracy and is now, by virtue of the lottery, the black box in which there still dwell, immortal and inescapable, Plato's philosopher-kings? And is it still possible to reconcile this kind of governing institu tion, however benign, with the structure of the universal army as a new kind of non-state, a kind of network or exoskeleton of the social needs and functions: something somewhere between a universal democracy, a political party, and a bureaucracy in which everyone is his own bureaucrat, an organizational fr amework on the order of the kinship system in so-called primitive communism or tribal society? For the kinship system also had the function of assigning tasks in such a fashion that they were not to be seen as the arbitrary result of individual decisions nor grasped as privileges. In a sense we already live a radical split between base and super structure, which we call public and private. It is always a delicate matter, in utopianizing, to distinguish between the utopian modifi cation of reality and the symbolic replication of what already exists. Adorno liked to quote the Jewish proverb which describes AN AMERICAN UTOPIA the world after the coming ofMessiah: "The same as this one, only just slightly different." Perhaps, indeed, something like that would hold fo r a world fr om which money suddenly disappeared. Still, it would be worthwhile trying out more strenuous propos als. I envisage a utopia of the double life, in which social reproduc tion, albeit only involving a few hours a day, is performed in work clothes and in teams, a little like going fo r army reserve duty. These shifts could be vertical or horizontal, that is, a shift every morning or night, or else a concentrated period of several weeks fo llowed by an equal stretch of what we used to call free time. Each of these temporal rhythms would no doubt generate a habitus, a kind of culture of its own, but what must be insisted on is that, whatever the labor, material or immaterial, it will in one way or another be collective and involve a distinct ontology, that of the collective project, collective life, the team as social being. In the world of the superstructure, no such specifications hold; the individual is as fr ee to be a recluse as a party person, to practice hobbies or to live out existence as a couch potato, to be a family man or professional mother, to volunteer fo r hospital work or to climb mountains or to struggle with drug addiction, to gamble on the stock market (some new fo rm of value competition to be invented here) or to write books, to conduct church services, to become a saint, or to live whatever underground life can still be invented. For the superstructure is a matter of invention; and to begin with, one expects its practitioners to distinguish their choices by the most extravagant garments. This is a wholly secular world, in which, as Sartre taught us, everything is perfo rmance, every thing is social construction. Our existential anxiety lies in the palpable fact that we are always at some slight distance fr om our choices (and free to change them at any point) and that, in that sense, there is no longer any human nature or any personal iden tity to weigh us down and offer the security of being one single unalterable personality. To be sure, the variety of individual biolo gies or bodies will still throw up individual talents or even genius; FREDRIC JAMESON and on the other hand, there will always be people who choose to identify so thoroughly with their "work" (their infrastructural morning obligations and tasks) that they know no other existence. There will be those who want the permanency of a home and a nine-to-fivejo b (we may consider this a nostalgic pastiche of capi talism circa 1950) and those who delight in constant change (a pastiche of tourism, homelessness, exploration). This is then the sense in which this new world will look exactly like the old one, with but a few minor modifications (which consist, as we may remember, in the guaranteed wage and in Fourier).

14.

The military utopia was fo unded, I said, on a separation between base and superstructure as absolute as that enforced in olden times between church and state (and it is worth observing, in passing, how many of those older institutional features have been retained, and yet radically transformed, by their new utopian context and inflection). The realm of necessity and the realm of freedom, it was said: yet not only their relationship to each other (so-called cultural revolution) remains fragile and subject to much tension and renegotiation (particularly across the generational divide), but there are also problems and contradictions within each realm, as I will note in closing. For the realm of necessity, it is not labor that offers any pecu liarly unresolvable or untheorizable problems: necessary produc tion can be calculated, hours reduced, transfers from one kind of work to another programmed on a voluntary basis, sabbaticals fo r study or retraining institutionalized-a systematic incorporation of information technology and a keen commitment to the develop ment of new kinds of production, the production of new needs and desires, as Marx put it. The guaranteed annual minimum wage, distributed generously enough, removes the desperation that used AN AMERICAN UTOPIA 8s to course through societies sickened by chronic as well as struc tural unemployment. As for social and income inequality, I quite like Barbara Goodwin's idea of five-year "life packages" distrib uted by lottery, and making it possible fo r citizens to spend a few years in luxurious mansions and a fe w more improving slums on the point of being reconstructed out of existence. No, the fundamental problem of the base is money or, if you prefer, capital. Our universal army, or (with apologies to the Iroquois) our military democracy, has changed the very context in which war took on its original meaning. Thus, as has been pointed out, William James's call for a moral equivalent to war, in an older society fu lfilled precisely by war itself, is now universally under stood to have meant that radical and thoroughgoing social trans fo rmation at which our citizen-soldiers work tirelessly every day, secure in the conviction that this new built environment, this new "second nature," this whole newly emerging outside world, is their own production and belongs to them in that primitive sense of ownership Locke ascribed to the world that preceded money. We may even rewrite a more infamous and sinister dictum of Hegel: namely, that war is the health of nations. Hegel was not himself a German nationalist (he was already thirty-eight when Fichte 's notorious Reden invented the sentiment); like Goethe, he is more likely to have been a secret admirer of Napoleon. Thus, barring some Callot- or Goya-like bloodthirsty fascination, reasonable interpreters have concluded that he had in mind the kind of momentary surge of collective pride and unity so frequently provoked by the outbreak of a long-impending conflict, such as is familiar in the descriptions of August 1914 all over Europe. I will, however, propose a different reading, namely that he had in mind the destruction of immense masses of capital as a conse quence of warfare: not the annihilation of people but the annihila tion of sheer accumulations of money as such. The end of World War II, like a convalescence fr om a terrible illness, fo r many coun tries involved a period of intense revolutionary hope when 86 FREDRIC JAMESON rebuilding and reconstruction meant radical change and the deployment of new energies, let alone new scientific discoveries and new modes of social action. That did not happen, fo r the most part and in most places, but that it could even be conceived was, according to me, predicated on poverty and on the destruction of money and capital. The United States today is sick, owing to the toxic accumulation of money and great fo rtunes which, like an infection, have found outlets only in luxury and the foulest right wing propaganda. Even the jubilee, and the wholesale abolition of the debt into which the majority of the population has fallen, would count fo r only a momentary and passing celebration if that ever increasing stockpile of riches were not destroyed. Utopias are practices of indigence and not collective self-indulgence. It is said that freedom-the exercise of autonomy that alters subjectivity irrevocably and turns it into agency-cannot be given but only taken. Such is also the benefit of capital as a source of production: it cannot simply be seized from the rich and somehow "applied" to other projects. It must know a moment of laborious and original accumulation, one we want to distinguish from the nightmare of capital's own origin (and its afterimage in Stalin's attempt to build socialism). As fo r money, it is to be sure the fo rm taken by original sin in most utopian visions, and in much political theory as well; the proposals to eliminate money altogether from a perfect world are as numer ous as those which purport to invent harmless substitutes fo r it, as in Proudhon's labor chits, which Marx so memorably sati rized, seizing as in a freeze-frame the moment in which inexora bly they turned back into money again. Special relations with this peculiar object have their place in Lacanian/Freudian diag nosis as well as in Fourier's ingenious and nonrepressive reme dies fo r them. Once money is decisively separated from capital in the universal "good sense" of the population, fantasies about its elimination will become less mesmerizing and its relationship to "value" less mysterious. AN AMERICAN UTOPIA

This does not exclude the establishment of new fo rms of carni val-resuscitating the potlatch, for example-nor the moral, if not material, need fo r a recurrent institution of the jubilee, the effacement of all debt. But it minimizes what is innately toxic in this alter ego of the commodity, whose sole utility lies in its ambig uous combination of the "measure" of value and the "means" of circulation. As for the superstructure, its content can scarcely be predicted, but the unresolvable tensions in its fo rm can certainly be antici pated. This will necessarily be a culture of groups, groups in perpetual emergence, groups in fu ll or gradual dissolution, groups in which individuals join in a collective resistance to groups as such, or in an effort to preserve the cohesion of the institutions which have emerged fr om them and now seem on the point of outliving themselves. Such groups will no longer take the fo rm of classes, in a society in which the latter no longer exist; are they to be considered "factions" in the sense of those pre-party fo rma tions which the ancients (the theoreticians ofbourgeois society) so bitterly resisted? The fundamental permissiveness of the new soci ety cannot forbid or exclude them, inasmuch as its Fourieresque spirit prescribes a constant participation of fo rmer individuals in groupings and combinations of all kinds, large and small. But groups must be subject to time and mortality, processes whose function generational change can now be expected to take over fr om the misleading and objectionable organic disintegration of the individual body. I have often quoted Robert C. Elliott's fu ndamental observation that a utopia can be judged by the quality and position of the works of art it fo retells; most, like More's, are either mute on the subject or distinctly unsatisfying, as in Morris and Bellamy alike. Marx, meanwhile, contented himself with wondering what the Greeks would still have to say to this new world. But I have also proposed that we reconsider the vocation of an older socialist realism as the critique of bureaucracy as such: the Hegelian power of the 88 FREDRIC JAMESON negative is secured and strengthened here, in the nagging and obsessive sniping at the group itself as it begins to ossify into an institution. The older utopias were perplexed in their contempla tion of a fu ture literature still organized around individual subjects, whose suffering and conflicts they now believed to have been solved. Once it is understood that the proper subject of literature is the group-the other arts clearly enough having the collective built into them in one way or another-the renewal of literature in utopia resolves itself and indeed becomes inescapable, in a situa tion in which the one extreme of the group congeals over into the state and bureaucracy and the other into simmering clashes, small scale animosities, and civil wars. But the group is fo rmed around the project, and this is why it must not only be called a conspiracy but felt and lived that way; each group project must be a crime underway, the realization of the Universal. Each must be a new crime, thereby acknowledging the demands of time itself, which wants fresh blood, which wants to undermine the constitutions and break as many rules as possible. The political problems, then, are twofold, and they are the same. The firstis called federalism (the name of a problem), and it asks how to regulate the antagonisms between the various groups. The second asks the same question about the (necessarily individual) antagonisms within the group, when those are not resolved by the existence of the common project. And what to do about the sad passions? Hatreds are the easiest and the most insoluble: they ask fo r reci procity, and then the twin hatreds are bound together like lovers and must, I suppose, be allowed to consummate their passion. But normally it is envy which is at stake, and which Lacan defines as the theft of enjoyment: I envy thejouissance of the Other, which he has in fact stolen fr om me. To disprove this envy, to assure me that the Other has no more enjoyment than I do, is a barren outcome. What must instead be celebrated is enjoyment itself, that it exists, and that it does not matter who has it inasmuch as no one can really AN AMERICAN UTO PIA have it in the first place: this is the true overcoming of envy, its elevation into a kind of religion. It is in that direction also, I suppose, that the "solution" of the most intractable political problem is to be sought, the problem of federalism, the hatred of one group fo r the other and fo r its theft of my collective enjoyment (my natural resources, fo r example, or my big-city mentality, my proximity to nature, my machismo or my metrosexuality). Perhaps this is done by wresting the big cities away from their states and making them universal terrains that belong to everybody and to no one: places of anonymous collective wealth and of orgiastic yet cosmopolitan celebration, where troops of open mouthed yokels mingle with city slickers, with lots of pickpocketing and outright fistfights. But this space has to be real, somehow, and not staged games a la Callenbach, even if it involves casualties and mortalities. In other words the redistribution of goods and surplus has to be absolute, an iron law like nature itself; trespassing it must be punished, provided the punishment is a pleasure. Still, the critique of bureaucracy, even heightened into a meta physical critique of the group itself as a fo rm, is not the only task of a cultural revolution of which we have said that it is necessarily a kind of therapy, a reprogramming of the now disruptive habits of an older society or mode of production into new and productive ones. In an affluent society like our own-economically menaced, in any case, by the redistribution of wealth and the expenses to be paid in a prodigious attempt to establish anything like economic equality-the cultural habit that would seem to demand the most urgent attention is that of consumerism, a kind of universal addic tion which can surely not be cured by abstention or criminaliza tion, nor indeed by simple legalization either. But is this associa tion of commodity consumption with the psycho-physical disorder of addiction not simply a regression to those older fo rms of culture critique already abundantly denounced above? For here we have assimilated a stereotypical public image of the addict (which can be the drug user but also the bulimic or the compulsive gambler, FREDRIC JAMESON even the compulsive sex addict) with another image, which is that of American social life generally: the buying of food and care, the advertising of any number of name brands, the trappings of a whole affiuentsociet y. We combine these two images in such a way that the firstreveals or discloses the truth or the skeletal substruc ture of the latter, peeling an appearance away to disclose a night marish underlying reality. This is the use of metaphor as a well nigh filmic process, a kind of trope in which the tenor is effaced to the benefitof the vehicle. It is not a static trope like metaphor, but it remains a cultural object which is consumed, often with a certain poetic pleasure or satisfaction. (One can become addicted to such pleasures as well, as the plethora of social-diagnostic books in current society testifies.) But this-what I have generally called the "culture critique" in order to underscore its shoddiness and unloveliness as an intellectual operation and artifact-is very far fr om constituting analysis. The latter must necessarily be fo rmu lated as a concept which can structurally and functionally be inte grated into the more general structural analysis of capitalism in order to qualify as "knowledge" (or as the opposite of "opinion" [doxa], something which can itself be an object of avid cultural consumption, as is every day apparent in the media). I have no particular revulsion fo r such consumption and such pleasures, whether those of consumerism or of cocaine-indeed, we must rigorously exclude all moralism from their analysis as well as fr om that of a given society as a whole-but their construction leads on to no fu rther production any more than a poetic figure generally would, and it is to produce fu rther problematization and theoriza tion that we ought to be concerned here. It would then be desirable to theorize addiction, at least to the point at which it becomes a kind of structural analysis (or "knowledge") on the level with the concept of commodificationitself . Indeed, the "spiritual" determi nants of the latter ("theological niceties" and the like, in Marx's definition) perhaps give us an opening here, fo r as Marx describes it, the commodity is no longer a material thing but a kind of AN AMERICAN UTOPIA 91 amphibious entity, partly corresponding to a need and partly exer cising a signifying function which one hesitates to relate to the aesthetic, but which is surely the object of a kind of ideal or aesthetic fascination, all the while retaining the appearance of a bodily need (or something analogous to one). There might be two ways of approaching the problem. We have already mentioned Marx's diagnosis of the "spiritualization" of the commodity, a process inherent in its very fo rm. But this is not to be understood as a sublimation of some sort; rather, the "theologi cal" dimension is present by way of money itself as a pure form (or empty signifier, if you prefer). Sublimation preserves elements of the concrete desire in a rarefied dimension, so that we still are involved in something determinate when we transfer it to that level. Nothing of the sort is present in the commodity form, fr om which all physical determination, all relationship to a specific bodily need or function, is absent-an expensive umbrella is as spiritual, as theological, as a priceless can of caviar or a rare book. It is therefore the passage through the money fo rm that empties concrete use value fr om the object in question and transforms it into a commodity, an object which can be measured abstractly against all the others of its kind. Consumerism as a passion, then, like collecting or hoarding but in its own unique way, has money somewhere in its constitution, and can be expected to wither on the vine in a society in which money no longer plays a central role. In this firsttheoretical approach, the body is still present, but in the heavily or lightly effaced fo rm in which use value has been somehow transmogrified into exchange value-the latter still preserving, as it were, the dim memory or the fleeting shadow of an older use, like the lost or buried material foundation of an abstraction. The body will remain crucial in our second alterna tive, but now in a more Freudian or Lacanian way. Here, to be sure, we still confront the gravitational pull of the Other (as it is registered in the very structure of exchange, fo r example), but by way of its absence. The most recent theories of 92 FREDRIC JAMESON addiction suggest that it is an attempt, in whatever fo rm, to free the subject from the Other and from the mimetic hold of the Other's desire, and to institute a condition in which, with the assistance of this or that external medium, we are able to indulge a desire and its "satisfaction" which is utterly independent of the Other's exist ence (in a way which, as the Lacanians are able to explain techni cally, is distinct from the psychotic's "freedom from language" or the pervert's unshakeable certainty about the Other's desire). To consider consumerism as an addiction in this sense would involve a view of" consumer goods" as a kind of objectal medium surround ing us and isolating us fr om the more agonizing dilemmas posed by every concrete existence of the Other, but also of a world in which isolation from the Other has somehow become an urgent need. For the Lacanians, of course, no solution to the psychic alienation of the Other is possible, but awareness of that impossi bility is; it may also be possible to imagine a society in which such awareness is more readily accessible than in our own, along with a Fourieresque relationship to desire which lends the latter's unap peasable insistence a wholly different tone and quality. As fo r the Marxian alternative outlined at the beginning, mapping our posi tion in the network of production and exchange, of distribution and consumption, would necessarily weaken the psychic invest ments available to whatever passes as money in that situation, consigning the passionate consumer to some mere local niche in the Fourieresque permutational scheme. Here, then, we approach the most intractable contradiction in the utopian superstructure: that moment in which the opposition between permanence (institutionalization) and permanent change gradually transforms itself into an opposition between permissive ness and discipline, awakening all the latent fo rces of cultural envy and in the process awakening in the distance the immense shadow of the Law, or in other words of the antisocial as such, and thereby reenergizing those limits even a utopian society must set for its own self-preservation or reproduction. Or is it possible to imagine AN AMERICAN UTOPIA 93 a utopia which precisely transcends the societal fo rm as such by doing away with such constitutive limits in the first place (just as Adorno imagined the-to be sure individual-utopia as the place in which individuals gave up their innate drive to self-preserva tion)? Any insistence on radical permissiveness at the level of culture will necessarily have to deal with the bitterest envies. The guaranteed minimum wage, the freedom to do nothing at all and to drug yourself into oblivion, obviously makes such a utopia into a paradise fo r slackers: yet this society is wealthy enough to let them go their own way, and a Fourieresque psychoanalysis will help us absorb the envy and bitterness, the sad passions, that will follow them fr om other workers in this vineyard, such as the reli gious fundamentalists. What the latter must learn is that such bitterness and envy is itself a jouissance, a precious possession, a passion and a satisfaction that is productive in its own right. The orgiastic vision such fr eedom inevitably conjures up, however-a world in which drugs and sexual license reign supreme and all the unproductive self-indulgences of a new kind of unem ployment sicken the mind-such a vision needs to be understood as the objective fantasy and the ideological opposite number and indissociable component of those dystopias of technological subjection and surveillance, of famine and atomic winters, we have already mentioned earlier. Both complement each other and are the imaginary reflexof a society divided between the fr eedoms of the rich and privations of the impotent poor, a late-capitalist soci ety whose insurmountable contradictions confine theimagination to a desperate oscillation between impossible solutions and anti thetical fu tures. This opposition is obviously also reflected in the present utopian proposal, which still divides the day into what used to be called work and leisure, namely a regimented morning and an afternoon and evening of aimless free time and potential boredom: what we have identified as base and superstructure. But I hope it is not some essentialist appeal to an eternal human nature to suggest that people are generally not very satisfied with the 94 FREDRIC JAMESON unproductive, however much it may be identified with pleasure as such, any more than they are resigned to externally dictated activ ity, let alone workaholism. It is therefore to be expected that in the utopian course of things labor will become cultural and the realm of freedom indissoluble from necessity. This is not to suggest the pseudo-Hegelian reconciliation so many people have attributed to utopia in a pejorative sense: that would be to attribute compromise and uniformity to an insurmountable multiplicity of personal solu tions. It would no doubt also conjure up the unthinkable and self contradictory notion of an end of history, an unacceptable slogan whose circulation merely testifies to our cognitive limitations when it comes to the thinking of utopia itself. In these cases, we must be careful to let the future dispose of our current contradic tions as it will, rather than to flail about within them in a thereby self-imposed paralysis of the imagination. As for crime, or more accurately put, the antisocial: As someone with a horror of the death penalty and of prisons generally, I recommend a return to the old Greek and Tsarist traditions of banishment, but I also propose adoption of Samuel Delany's magnificent institution (in his utopian novel Triton) of a so-called "unlicensed sector," where no law exists and anything goes: but it occurs to me that this might in fact be the role of the city itself, as its fo rm survives the great transformation. Zizek has often quoted Chesterton-a fellow traveler in the peril ous effort of coordinating passionate belief withorthod oxy-to the effect that we must see the Law as something even more exciting than crime. Here is the old philosophical crux of the Universal and the Particular, which has such strong political vibrations and rever berations, and of whose Hegelian version Zizek has given us so perverse and pertinent a fresh version: the particular tending always toward the exceptional, it is the exception that ends up constituting the Law, the Universal; the whole generic system thereby tilts and swings upside down, and it is the empirical which ends up being the general, in what he calls the "singular universal." AN AMERICAN UTOPIA 95

So now, in the realm of the collective, it is this that must be tested, in the strongest sense of the word. We can then read Chesterton as a way of restoring excitement to the Law: it is to be grasped as a criminal adventure, and this transcends those still too individualistic categories of the act and the event. We must think of gangs and criminal conspiracies, we must think of illegal groups, of small-scale plots, large-scale robberies, raids, takeovers, sorties, elaborate schemes and carefully designed executions, each one on task, everyone in the right place at the right time. This is the point at which the old adage that business (or the state itself) is a conspir acy against the public slowly turns over into its positive form: yes, the Law should also be a conspiracy-all collective action, all collective projects, should have the transgressive excitement of the conspiracy; it is the conspiracy which is the strong fo rm both of crime and of the collective. One, two, many conspiracies: such is the utopian social order, such is the new revolutionary state (or the revolutionary withering away of the state, if you prefer). And this is the truth and wisdom of Zizek's dialectical reversal of Hegel: a friend, Andre Gide once said, is someone with whom you would be happy to fa ire un mauYais coup. So should be all action, the conspiratorial aim, annulling the individual animosities, the fric tions and envies, the incompatibilities of our existence as individu als in society. The stereotypes of army life are above all relevant here, for barracks life, the life of the recruit or draftee, always involves being thrown together with people utterly unlike you, from wholly different and incompatible backgrounds, classes, ethnicities, and even sexes. The instantaneous dislikes and distaste ful cultural unfamiliarities, the inescapable elbow-rubbing with people with whom you have nothing in common and would normally avoid-this is true democracy, normally concealed by the various class shelters, the professions, or the family itself (which may well, however, also be felt and lived as just such an intolerable cohabitation of incompatible temperaments and people who get on each other's nerves), and warded offby wealth in its FREDRIC JAMESON gated communities and walled estates. This is the place of what Laclau called antagonism, which he tended to substitute fo r class struggle and to bend in a Hobbesian direction: this is the true horror of democracy itself, as the aristocratic distaste of all the reactionary manifestoes testifies.It celebrates its euphoric moments of collective reconciliation in the great mass demonstrations and flash mobs, the "lyric illusion" of the triumphant revolutionary crowds, but then settles down into the daily grind of the petty democratic antagonisms which biological individuals inevitably fe el toward one another and from which both empty idealism and Spinoza's "sad passions" derive. We have only reached the point in which a universal militariza tion permits the organization of a minimum of necessary produc tion sufficientto satisfy the multiple needs of a given population, fr om food and housing to education and medical treatment, thereby liberating a free time unexpected and unplanned fo r in Darwinian evolution and the natural world. This is the moment in which, as Sartre put it, existentialism supersedes Marxism as a phil osophic horizon, and we can detect the nature of our own ideo logical reflexesby way of our reactions to it. However those may be, it is at the very least at least one way in which an alternate fu ture can be imagined as opening once again, a future sealed and effacedby the absolute limits currently imposed by late capitalism as such. So this may not be the place to stop, but also to begin. 2

Mutt and Jeff Push the Button

Kim Stanley Robinson

"Whoever writes the code creates the value." "That isn't even close to true." "Yes it is. Value resides in life, and life is coded, like with DNA." "So bacteria have values?" "Sure. All life wants things and goes after them. Viruses, bacteria, all the way up to us." "Which by the way it's your turn to clean the toilet." "I know. Life means death." "So, today?" "Some today. Back to my point. We write code." "Right, we write." "Without our code, no firewalls,no finance,no banks, no money, no exchange value, no value." "All but that last, I see what you mean. But so what?" "Did you read the news today?" "Of course not." "You should. It's bad. Things are falling apart." "Things are always falling apart. It's like what you said. Life means death. It's messy." KIM STANLEY ROBINSON

"But more than ever. More than it needs to be." "This I know. It's why we live in a tent on a roof." "Yes, but it's getting worse. The food panic is freaking people out." "Rightfully so. That's the real value, food in your belly. And it isn't fungible. If you have money but you can't buy fo od, you're fucked, because you can't eat money." "But that's what I'm saying!" "No you're not." "Mutt." "Jeff." "Mutt. Hang with me. Follow what I'm saying. We live in a world where people pretend all values are fungible, so money can buy you anything, so money is the point, so we all work fo r money. Money is thought of as value. People don't see the difference." "Okay I get that. We 're broke and I get that." "So good, keep fo llowing me here." "What will you pay me for fo llowing you?" "One bitcoin." "So you'll run your computer all night factoring new numbers fo r pi, and thus I'm compensated?" "You'll have a bitcoin you didn't have, put it that way." "Okay, deal. You promise?" "Yes." "Write it down." "Done. Promissory note fo r one bitcoin." "Money in the bank. Okay, your meter is running. Speak on." "So, we live in a money economy where everything is grossly underpriced, except fo r rich people's compensation, but that's not the main problem. The main problem is we 've agreed to let the market set prices." "The invisible hand." "Right. Sellers offer goods and services, buyers buy them, and in the flux of supply and demand the price gets determined. That's MUTT AND JEFF PUSH THE BUTTON 99 the cumulative equilibrium, and its prices change as supply and demand change. It's crowdsourced, it's democratic, it's the market." " "Theo n 1yw ay. "Right. But it's always, always wrong. Its prices are always too low, and so the world is fu cked. We 're in a mass extinction event, the climate is cooked, there 's a fo od panic, everything you're not reading in the news." "All because of the market." "Exactly. It's not just there are market failures. It's the market is a failure." "How so, what do you mean?" "I mean the cumulative equilibrium underprices everything. Things and services are sold fo r less than it costs to make them." "That sounds like the road to bankruptcy. " "It is, and lots of businesses do go bankrupt. But the ones that don't haven't actually made a profit,they've just gotten away with selling their thing fo r less than it cost to make it. They do that by hiding or ignoring some of the costs of making it. That's what everyone does, because they're under the huge pressure of market competition. They can't be undersold or they'll go out of business, because every buyer buys the cheapest version of whatever. So the sellers have to shove some of their production costs offtheir books. They can pay their labor less, of course. They've done that, so labor is one cost they don't pay. That's why we 're broke. Then raw materials, they hide the costs of obtaining them, also the costs of turning them into stuff. Then they don't pay fo r the infrastruc ture they use to get their stuffto market, and they don't pay fo r the wastes they dump in the air and water and ground. Finally they put a price on their good or service that's about 10 percent of what it really cost to make, and buyers buy it at that price. The seller shows a profit, shareholder value goes up, the executives take their bonuses and leave to do it again somewhere else, or retire to their 100 KIM STANLEY ROBINSON mansion island. Meanwhile the biosphere and the workers who made the stuff, also all the generations to come, they take the hidden costs right in the teeth." "But they got a cheap TV out of it." "Right, so they can watch something interesting as they sit there broke." "Except there 's nothing interesting on." "Well, but this is the least of their problems. I mean actually you can usually find something interesting on. Turner Classic Movies, fo r instance." "Please. We 've seen everything they've got multiple times." "Everyone has. I'm just saying the boredom of bad TV is not the biggest of our worries. Mass extinction is our biggest worry. Or hunger. Or wrecking kids' lives before they even get a chance. These are bigger worries." "Granted fo r the sake of argument." "So look, it's capitalism. The problem, I mean. It's the market system. We 've got good tech, we 've got a nice planet, we 're fu ck ing all that up by way of stupid laws. That's what capitalism is, a set of stupid laws." "Say I grant that too, which maybe I do. So what can we do?" "It's a set of laws! And it's global! It extends all over the Earth, there 's no escaping it, we 're all in it, and no matter what you try to do, the system rules." "I'm not seeing the what-we-can-do part." "Think about it! The laws are on the books by way of being coded into the computers, the Internet, the cloud. Laws are codes and they run the world. They make the value. There are sixteen laws running the whole world." "To me that seems too few. Too few or too many." "No. They're articulated, of course, but it comes down to sixteen laws. I've done the analysis." "As always. But it's still too many. You never hear about sixteen of anything. There are the eight noble truths, the two evil MUTT AND JEFF PUSH THE BUTTO N 101

stepsisters. Maybe twelve of something at most, like recovery steps, or apostles, but usually it's single digits." "Quit that. It's a global economy, so it takes sixteen laws to run it. They're distributed between the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the Wo rld Bank, and the G20. Financial transactions, currency exchange, trade law, corporate law, tax law. Everywhere the same." "I'm still thinking sixteen is either too few or too many." "Sixteen, I'm telling you, and they're isomorphic, and they're encoded. So they can be changed by changing the codes. Look what I'm saying: You change those sixteen, you're like turning a key in a big lock. The key turns, and everything goes fr om bad to good. The system, instead of hurting people, helps people. It restores landscapes, stops the extinctions, fo od gets grown, the cleanest techs get deployed. And it's global, so defectors can't get outside it. Bad money gets turned to dust, bad actions likewise. No one could cheat. It would make people be good." "Please Jeff? You're sounding scarier and scarier." "I'm just saying! Besides what's scarier than right now?" "Change? I don't know. It just sounds scary." "What's scary? You can't even read the news, right? Because it's too fucking scary?" "Well, and I don't have the time." Jefflaughs till he puts his fo rehead on the table. Even then he laughs, his head lightly bouncing. Mutt has to laugh to see his friend so amused. They are friends, they amuse each other, they work long hours together writing code that encrypts security fo r a big flash trader living with his supercomputers on a barge in the Meadowlands. They like their tent on the roof of their building in Manhattan, which lies flooded below them like a super Venice gleaming in the night, majestic, liquid, superb. Their town. Jeff raises his head. "Look, Ellen has shown me how to break into the WTO computers, and we know how to write code, we are the best coders in the world." 102 KIM STANLEY ROBINSON

"Or at least in the building." "No come on, the world! And Ellen's gotten us where we need to go. It turns out the WTO is the best way to start. After that it's a firewall creeper." "What do you mean?" "Check it out!" Jeff points at his screen. "We're in there, and I've got the codes ready. Sixteen revisions. Some are little tweaks, some are like complete reversals." "Now you really are scaring me." "Well sure, but look, check it out. See what you think." Mutt moves his lips when he reads. He's not saying the words silently to himself, he 's doing a kind of Nero Wolfe stimulation of his brain. It's his favorite neurobics exercise, of which he has many. Now he begins to massage his lips with his fingers as he reads on. This exercise signals worried reflection. "Tell me what this one means," he says, pointing. "Speed-trading surcharge, a hundredth of a point per trans- action." "One ten-thousandth of a cent? One millionth of a dollar?" "It adds up fast. I call it lancing the boil." "What about this one?" "Full employment." "Nice, but, I don't know how to say it, but it looks like you're getting that by drafting everyone into the army." "That's right, but since everyone's in it, that makes it more like national service. Everyone has to do it." "For how long?" "Birth to grave." "Really? This is your cure?" "Yeah sure! See what it gets you? Free health care, education, housing, vacations, clothes." "Well, I always wanted free clothes." "I know, I put that in there fo r you. No more trips to the Salvation Army. " MUTT AND JEFF PUSH THE BUTTON

"I would miss that." "You can still do it if you want. So much work gets done by everybody that you'll only have to put in eight hours a week." "What about political objections? Won't people freak out?" "Politics becomes like going to the thrift shop. Some people do it fo r fun, most don't bother." "No politics?" "No politics, no business, no psychology, no privilege, no class. Everyone 's on the same team, see? It's like when you're in high school." "How utopian can you get?" "It's just a differentcode. We all become bureaucrats." "You're outdoing yourself." "You'd become head honcho of the Institute of Mutt." "I like that. And the speed-trading charge will pay fo r all this?" "Not entirely. Look at number fifteen. There 's a steeply progressive charge on capital assets. I call that one deoligarchification." "You're so good with these names." "That clogged wealth gets distributed equally to everyone, so we all end up with a living wage, which we won't need fo r the necessities anyway, because they're part of being in the army. So it's a kind of slush fund to fo ol around with. Because money will always come in handy." "Bitcoins again?" "Sometimes. Whatever currency you like. Fucking currencies are fu cking fungible. Nothing else is." "And is number nine here a carbon tax?" "What's a tax? I don't know what that word means! Number nine is about paying the true cost of things. Same with number two. Number two means we pay the true cost oflabor, always." "Won't that be kind of expensive?" "What's expensive? It's the cost ofliving! We pay ourselves the cost ofliving. Money is just a kind of public utility. Especially once you deoligarchify all the capital assets." 104 KIM STANLEY ROBINSON

Mutt nods. "Okay, I like that. But, you know, this system doesn't look like it would be very efficient." "Of course not. Efficiency was just a measurement of how fast money moved fr om the poor to the rich. We prefer the opposite of efficiency, which is to say, justice." "There you go with your names again." "I think justice is a good name." Mutt keeps reading. Finally he says, "Okay, I see what you've got here. I like it. It could be fun. Almost sure to be humorous." Jeffnods. He taps the return key. His new set of codes goes out into the world. They leave their hotello, which is a walk-in tent assembled from a kit, and stand at the railing of their building's roof balcony, look ing down at the drowned city. Lights squiggle offthe black water flooring the town. A few skyscrapers around them are very well lit, but most are dark. It's quiet, weird, beautiful, spooky. There 's a ping fr om inside and they go back in the tent. Jeff reads his computer screen. "Ah shit!" he says. "We're drafted!" "Well-congratulations, right?" Jeffgulp s. "Hope so." Mutt reads the screen. "Wait, is this drafted, or busted?" The roof's service elevator door opens. 3

Dual Power Redux

Jodi Dean

Fredric Jameson's "American utopia" returns to the notion of dual power as a model fo r revolutionary change. Unlike either Lenin's classic fo rmulation of soviets and provisional government or contemporary anarchist suggestions fo r institutional counter power coexisting alongside the state, Jameson's version of dual power uses the state to dismantle the state. In a two-part move, he offers, first, a political program that expands one part of the state, the military, against another part, representative government. Jameson proposes, second, a utopian vision that extends this mili tary arrangement to eliminate the political altogether. From the transitional dual power of active military and ineffective govern ment evolves a new classless society organized in terms of the dual power of base and superstructure, economy and culture, military work and creative leisure (all variations on the same split between a realm of necessity and a realm of freedom). Not only is politics unnecessary in this utopian arrangement, the political has no place. Jameson's idea of a universal army may seem provocative. However, his fantasy of an end to politics echoes prevailing anti and post-political sentiments as it eschews the state. The political 106 JODI DEAN question ofdecision -what is to be done and who decides-disap pears. It returns in Jameson's utopian proposal in truncated form: a Psychoanalytic Placement Bureau that uses "unimaginably complex computers" to organize employment. This leap of utopian imagination springs from an absence of trust in the people, as if the fact of a divided people implied the impossibility of self-govern ance rather than establishing its constitutive condition. In place of the sovereignty of the people (understood in Leninist terms as the revolutionary alliance of the oppressed), Jameson gives us the "population" as the subjectless substance to be managed. 1 This vision extends rather than confronts the capitalist view of persons as nothing other than economic units. At a time when riots and revolutions point to left resurgence across the globe, Jameson's military model of collectivity directs us away fr om the dual power with actual political potential: crowds and party. 2 In recent decades, an intensifying array of demonstra tions, occupations, strikes, and blockades has returned the ques tion of the party fo rm to the center of left politics. Running up against impasses that recur with "predictable if dispiriting regular ity," current struggles pose pressing organizational questions.3 How can our actions scale and endure? How can they link up, rein fo rce one another, advance an agenda, and achieve political results? In contrast with a utopian proposal distanced from actual move ments, "the question of the party-form" takes place "with refer ence to, and indeed fr om within the dynamics of, contemporary struggles," as Jason E. Smith rightly points out. Challenged to

For a discussion of the sovereignty of the people in terms of the revo lutionary alliance of the oppressed, see Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon, London: Verso, 2012. 2 On dual power see also Susana Draper, "Within the Horizon of an Actuality: The State and the Commons in the Eternal Return of Communism," South Atlantic Quarterly, Fall 2014: 807-20. 3 Jason E. Smith, "Contemporary Struggles and the Question of the Party: A Reply to Gavin Walker," Theoryand Event 16.4, 2013. DUAL POWER REDUX generate and sustain collective energies, political movement thrusts the problematic of the party back onto the terrain of left theory and practice. Peter D. Thomas notes that

it has been practical experience of the contradictory processes of left regroupment on an international scale-from reconfigurations over the last decade on the Latin American left, to the varying success of coalition parties in Europe such as Die Linke in Germany, Izquierda Unida in Spain, Syriza in Greece and the Front de Gauche in France, to the tentative emergence of new political fo rmations across North Africa and the Arab world-that has firmly placed the question of the party back on the contemporary agenda. 4

Movement actors increasingly recognize the limitations of a poli tics conceived in terms of issue- and identity-focused activisms, mass demonstrations that fo r all intents and purposes are essen tially one-offs, and the momentary localism of anarchist street fighting. With urgency born from intensified economic inequality and the uneven distribution of the effects of planetary warming, they are pressing again the organizational question, reconsidering the political possibilities of the party fo rm. To the extent that Jameson's utopian proposal contributes to the present task of inciting a desire for organizationon the left, its testing of our "ideological reflexes" is useful. But insofar as Jameson repeats the rejection of party and state characteristic of left post-politics, his proposition has already been tried and found wanting. His universal army is an inverted form of the multitude of autonomous, incommu nicable struggles celebrated on the left since 1968. For decades, tendencies on the left have disparaged party politics targeting the state and championed social movements targeting society. 5 Where

4 Peter D. Thomas, "The Communist Hypothesis and the Question of Organization," Theory & Event 16.4, 2013. 5 Differing instances of this same turn can be fo und in Ernesto Laclau 108 JODI DEAN

anarchists and post-Marxists ofvarious stripes try to sidestep the state by urging the pluralization of the economy, Jameson sidesteps the state with the opposite tack: universal conscription into a military responsible fo r the economy. In each case, the struggle to build and exercise political power, to use the state in the collective interests of poor and working people, is given up. The weakness of Jameson's proposal, then, stems fr om his imagining ofleft organization in terms of an economic army of everyone rather than as a political party faithful to egalitarian people 's struggle.

Be All That Yo u Can Be

Jameson's political program builds fr om the idea that the army is the only existing institution capable of exercising a revolutionary function (he qualifies his vision of the army as "pre-Rumsfeld ian"). The army is disciplined and democratizing (in the sense of mixing together different groups). It acts across state boundaries, exceeding local jurisdiction. The army provides education, train ing, and health care. Given this already existing capacity, Jameson argues, the army should be expanded to include everyone between the ages of sixteen and sixty. It can then take over most production and distribution and thereby ensure full employment, Jameson's highest social priority. The ineffective representative government of the present will wither away as the army becomes a new social structure, the exoskeleton of society. It's hard to tell what makes Jameson's universal army an army. On the one hand, he says that the conscription of everyone into his

and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, London, Verso: 1985; Jean Cohen and Andrew Arata, Civil Society and Po litical Theory, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992; and Felix Guattari and Antonio Negri, New Lines of Alliance, Ne w Sp aces of Liherty, New York: Autonomedia, 2010, originally published in French in 1985. DUAL POWER REDUX glorified National Guard will make it unmanageable, incapable of carrying out fo reign wars or coups. So this is an army that does not fight. On the other hand, Jameson says that conscientious objec tors will be employed in arms development and storage. But why would a military incapable of carrying out wars need arms? Given that Jameson reorients disease control, education, disaster relief, infrastructure repair, and food distribution under the army, how is it possible that its units would not be capable of carrying out wars or coups, especially if arms development has continued? Further complicating the question of how his army is an army, Jameson underplays hierarchy and the chain of command, key elements of military organization. This enables him to avoid dealing with the brutally obscene rituals of hazing endemic to military discipline. It also lets him ignore political power and decision-making and present the military as a decentralized network capable of overcoming federalism's separations. A consequence of Jameson's approach to federalism in general and the structure of the US Constitution in particular, then, is the nature of this overcoming. Is it a fantasy of national unity or of imperial expansion? Jameson proposes that the military absorb the entire population, but population of what? The United States? North America? The Western Hemisphere? The Pacific Rim? The world? This absorption presses all the more intensely the question of the military's purpose: building a nation or conquering the world? Jameson's utopian military in fact has no political purpose. Its role is economic, concentrated on the base. The military provides full employment, thereby solving what Jameson presents as the most pressing social problem. Full employment, however, is as purposeless a purpose as economic growth and productivity, a repetition of pointless activity for its own sake. Questions of resource allocation, social priorities, and cultural limits remain. These are political questions, sites of antagonism around which collectivity constitutes itself. 110 JODI DEAN

The single feature that makes Jameson's universal army a mili tary fo rce is conscription. The army he imagines is a nonvolun tary, nonelective mode of association. People are fo rced to partici pate in a common scheme, regardless of their individual differences or preferences. The universal army is a collectivity one does not choose. The emphasis on collectivity is an advantage to Jameson's approach. He rejects the individualism that has trapped the contemporary left in an iron cage, bringing out the primacy of the collective. Moreover, he anchors his account in Lacanian psycho analysis, rightly rejecting Freud's attempt to explain group psychology via identification through love fo r a leader. So why, then, does Jameson fo llow Freud in treating the army as his model of the collective (Freud's other model is the church)? It could be that Jameson's emphasis on the army is a residuum of his embrace of another element of Freud's discussion in Group Psychology and the Analysisof the Ego, envy. Freud explains the demand for equal ity that structures relations between group members as an effectof an original envy: "Social justice means that we deny ourselves many things so that others may have to do without them as well."6 Jameson, too, mobilizes envy in the service of his utopian proposi tion, albeit in a Lacanian-Zizekian guise-"the theft of enjoy ment." Jameson treats the theft of enjoyment as synonymous with the idea thatjouissance cannot be satisfied. That this lack is consti tutive, "a permanent feature of the human condition," becomes fo r Jameson "a perpetual invitation to an ontological and cultural envy of the Other." Where Freud locates group attachment, Jameson finds rupture, the antagonism that prevents social harmony, an antagonism at the heart of collectivity. Jameson incorporates antagonism into his utopian model in several ways. Drawing from utopian Charles Fourier, he makes the "sad

6 Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, trans. by James Strachey, London: International Psycho-Analytical Press, 1922, 88. DUAL POWER REDUX 111 passions" productive. Antisocial drives will be put to use fo r the generation of new combinations and assemblages. Rather than repressed, as with Freud, envy and other negative passions will be expressed, even celebrated as enjoyment. This is what the superstruc tural realm of culture is fo r: it's the space fo r self-indulgence and personal freedom. People 's time will be divided between their mili tary service, their work obligations (which may be a few hours a week or a few weeks a year), and their free time, the leisure they have to do whatever they like. Big cities can be designated pleasure zones: "places of anonymous collective wealth and of orgiastic yet cosmo politan celebration, where troops of open-mouthed yokels mingle with city slickers, with lots of pickpocketing and outright fistfights." The Psychoanalytic Placement Bureau, availing itself of "unimagi nably complex computer systems," will handle emergent problems, the last remnant of the state now in the fo rm of "some enormous group therapy." In effect, though, it is the split in the social between base and superstructure that takes the place of antagonism. Jameson denies antagonism political expression,replacing it with a society that splits itself between its militarism and its enjoyment, holding the two together via group therapy and computers. No wonder he repeats Adorno's repetitionof the Jewish proverb describing the world after the coming of the Messiah: the same as this one, only just slightly different. His "American utopia" re-presents the eroded political of the contemporary United States back to us in utopian form. You want a society of militarism and enjoyment? You got it!

Another Crowd

Jameson prefaces his utopian proposal with a proviso leaving open the possibility of a different combination of elements. One such combination would join Jameson in emphasizing collectivity, but resist its military incorporation and instead begin with the crowd. Here the work of Elias Canetti is helpful. 112 JODI DEAN

Arguing that the first task of utopianism is diagnosing the fear of utopia, Jameson posits a terror of the collective: "the existential fear of losing our individuality in some vaster collective being." Canetti begins fr om a differentprimal fear: "There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown. "7 The one place where man is free of this fear is in a crowd. "The crowd he needs is the dense crowd, in which body is pressed to body," Canetti writes, "a crowd, too, whose psychical constitution is also dense, or compact, so that he no longer notices who it is that presses against him. "8 The presence of many relieves us of the anxiety of being touched by the strange or unknown. "Suddenly, it is as though everything were happening in one and the same body." Jameson, in contrast, holds on to biological individuation as an unsurpassable limit. Canetti's crowd is de-individualizing. It rejects presumptions of individuated embodiment as some kind of natural limit to collec tivity. As the crowd coalesces into its heterogeneous being, norms of appropriate proximity dissolve. Conventional hierarchies collapse. In place of the distinctions mobilized to produce the indi vidual form, there is a temporary being of multiple mouths, anuses, stomachs, hands and feet, a being comprised of fo ld upon fo ld of touching skin. Canetti describes the moment of the crowd's emergence as the "discharge." This is the point when "all who belong to the crowd get rid of their differences and feel equal."9 Up until that point, there may be a lot of people, but they are not yet that concentra tion of bodies and affects that is a crowd. Density, though, as it increases, has libidinal effects: "In that density, where there is scarcely any space between, and body presses against body, each

7 Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart, New Yo rk: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984, 15. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 17. DUAL POWER REDUX 113 man is as near the other as he is to himself, and an immense feeling of relief ensues. It is fo r the sake of this blessed moment, when no-one is greater or better than another, that people become a crowd."1° Canetti gives us the crowd as a strange attractor ofjouis sance, a figure of collective enjoyment. 11 The libidinal energy of the crowd binds it together fo r a "blessed moment," a moment Canetti renders as a "feeling of equality" in the shared intensity of the discharge. The feeling won't last. Inequality will return with the dissipation of the crowd. Very few give up the possessions and associations that separate them (and those who do fo rm what Canetti terms "crowd crystals"). But in the orgasmic discharge, "a state of absolute equality" supplants individuating distinctions.12 Canetti's crowd equality has nothing to do with the envy driv ing Freud's imaginary equality of rivals. Nor does it resemble bourgeois equality of the sort Marx excoriates in "The Critique of the Gotha Program." This is not the fo rmal equality of a common standard applied to different people, objects or expenditures of labor. Rather, the equality Canetti invokes is one where "a head is a head, an arm is an arm, and the differences between individual heads and arms is irrelevant."13 De-individuation accompanies intense belonging. Just as Marx parenthetically notes that unequal individuals "would not be different individuals if they were not unequal," so does Canetti associate inequality with differentiation, with the siphoning offof the fluid,mobile substance of collectivity into the fo rm of distinct individuals. The fo rce of equality in the crowd breaks down the always fragile and imaginary enclosure of the individual fo rm, enabling the collective to experience its collec tivity. Canetti argues that the crowd's equality infuses all demands

10 Ibid., 18. 11 On strange attractors, see Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Ne oliberal Fantasies, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009, 67-70. 12 Canetti, Crowds and Power, 29. 13 Ibid. 114 JODI DEAN fo r justice. Equality as belonging -not separation, weighing, and measure-is what gives "energy" (Canetti's term) to the longing fo r justice. With the "blessed moment" of belonging in the crowd's discharge, Canetti offers a view of equality fundamentally differ ent from the psychoanalytic association of equality with envy that Jameson adopts. In contrast with the military imagining of a class less society, equality in the crowd is de-differentiation, de-individ uation, the momentary release from hierarchy, closure, and sepa ration. "It is fo r the sake of this equality that people become a crowd and that they tend to overlook anything which might detract from it," Canetti writes. "All demands for justice and all theories of equality ultimately derive their energy from the actual experi ence of equality familiar to anyone who has been part of a crowd." 14 The press fo r equality comes not from ressentiment. It's not born of weakness or deprivation. It comes from the strength of many as it amplifies itself, reinforces itself, and pushes itself back upon itself. With shouts, exclamations, and noise-the spontaneous "utterance in common"-the crowd expresses the equality that is its substance. The crowd's density is its indivisibility or degree of solidarity. Understood physiologically, this density manifests itself in commonality of feeling, for example, the excitement that passes through the crowd, amplifying and feeding into itself. The "skill ful enactment of density and equality" engenders the crowd feeling. In addition to equality and density, Canetti attributes to crowds traits suggestive of what psychoanalysis treats as desire: growth and direction. Canetti's crowd wants to grow, to increase and spread. It will persist as long as it is moving toward a goal. If the crowd is to continue to exist, the goal must remain unattained. Expressed in Lacanian terms: desire is a desire to desire. The urge

14 Ibid. DUAL POWER REDUX 115 to increase is a push to be more, to eliminate barriers, to universal ize and extend the crowd feeling such that nothing is outside it. The crowd's direction is its goal. When common, the goal "strengthens the fe eling of equality. " The stronger the common goal is, the weaker the individual goals that threaten the crowd's density. Without its goal, the crowd disintegrates into individuals pursuing their own ends. The goal is outside the crowd, that toward which it is oriented. The goal is not the discharge, although the discharge is the aim. Crowds are a force of desire exerted by collectivity. When they amass in spaces authorized by neither capital nor the state, they breach the given, installing a gap of possibility. The presence of a crowd is then a positive expression of negation. People act together in ways impossible fo r individuals, a phenomenon that preoccu pied Freud. Pushing against dominant arrangements, the crowd prefigures acoll ective, egalitarian possibility-but "prefigures" in a completely literal way: "prior to figuration." The crowd by itself, unnamed, doesn't provide or represent an alternative. It cuts out an opening by breaking through the limits bounding permitted experience. People are there, but, through the active desire of the crowd, differently fr om how they were before, combined into a state of such absolute equality that "differences between individ ual heads and arms are irrelevant." Together previously separate people impress the possibility of the people as the collective subject of a politics. Jameson's utopian proposal overlaps with Canetti's crowd theory in several respects. Each approaches the social through the collective: Jameson via the coercive fo rce of conscription, Canetti via the affective pull of the crowd (the relief the crowd provides from the anxiety ofbeing touched by something strange). Likewise, each highlights the constitutive non-satisfaction of desire: Jameson, via envy and Canetti via growth. Finally, each attends to the libidi nal dimensions of collectivity. Jameson proposes overcoming envy by elevating it into a kind of religion: "what must instead be 116 JODI DEAN celebrated is enjoyment itself, that it exists, and that it does not matter who has it inasmuch as no one can really have it in the first place." Is this not but a description of the discharge, the moment of the crowd's orgasmic intensity when each escapes from the fe ar and isolation of the individual fo rm in which he had been trapped? Canetti writes: "In the crowd the individual fe els that he is tran scending the limits of his own person. He has a sense of relief, fo r the distances are removed which used to throw him back on himself and shut him in. With the lifting of these burdens of distance he feels free; his freedom is the crossing of these boundaries."15 Jameson explicitly rejects the crowd as a candidate for dual power. Adopting Hardt's and Negri's terminology, he associates the occupations and riots of the last decade with the constitutive power of the multitude. Mass uprisings such as Occupy and the Arab Spring fail as forms fo r dual power, he suggests, because they substitute information technology fo r political organization. Crowds assemble from Seattle to Wisconsin, Eastern Europe to Tahrir Square, as flash mobs enabled by cell phones.16 Jameson's own utopian proposal fo r the Psychoanalytic Placement Bureau also substitutes information technology for political organization. This implies that the problem of crowds is not the fact that they are mediated by personal communication devices. These devices are symptoms of something else, namely, the failure of mass uprisings to scale. Mediated crowds concentrate political energy into instances without duration. Unable to grow, theirs is a politics of the instance. For Jameson, this failure to endure is the "true horror of democracy." He writes: "It celebrates its euphoric moments of collective reconciliation in the great mass demonstrations and flash mobs, the 'lyric illusion' of the triumphant revolutionary crowds;

15 Ibid., 20. 16 In "Aesthetics of Singularity," Jameson compares flash mobs to the "flash crash" of the stock market in May 2010: Ne w LeftReview 92, March/ April 2015, 101-38. DUAL POWER REDUX 117 but then settles down into the daily grind of the petty democratic antagonisms which biological individuals inevitably feel towards one another, and fr om which both empty idealism and Spinoza's 'sad passions' derive." Jameson sides with the military because it organizes a classless society that can endure. As already mentioned, the universal army is an economic arrangement. It provides full employment and organizes produc tion. In its utopian fo rm, the universal army presupposes "the withering away, not only of the state but also of politics as such." How the army acquires its orientation and direction is unclear. Does the Psychoanalytic Placement Bureau decide? The Joint Chiefs of Staff? Or is everything already predecided in Jameson's personal fantasy? In any case, the elimination of politics fr om the universal army depoliticizes the people. They are one unit, but their unity has no political meaning. Any political divisions they might have are replaced by the division between work and leisure, that is, military obligations and fr ee time. Political antagonism is confined to Jameson's initial program of nationalizing the banks, seizing all energy sources, redistributing wealth, establishing a guaranteed minimum annual wage, etc. His initial program is a partisan program-decisive, divisive, appropriate fo r a commu nist party. In keeping with this program, the party and the political should be embraced, not replaced by the army. Jameson acknowledges that his army is something like a party. He introduces dual power with the examples of the Black Panthers and Hamas, networks that provide "practical help and leadership on a daily basis." Even with these examples, though, he treats the party form as if it were irrevocably constrained by the alternative of reform or revolution. No one believes in revolution anymore, he tells us. People have become disillusioned with communist parties. Reform hasn't fared any better. Left parties"a lways capitulate when they come to power." Jameson's objectionsto the party aren't convincing, given his military counterproposal. It's not like those leftists disillusioned with communist partiesare more enthusiastic about the military. 118 JODI DEAN

Although he jettisons the parties ofthe left, Jameson finds a role for liberal and social democratic parties in his transitional program. Their function is to talk and talk and talk. Although the system of representative government prevents them from actually accom plishing anything, liberal and social democratic parties are vehi cles and fo ra for discursive struggle. They can undermine their opponents' rhetoric, create new vocabularies, and make proposals. Jameson's limited acceptance of parliamentary parties isn't convincing, given his embrace of universal Wi-Fi. Globally networked personal communications provide sites fo r talk. Detached from policies, actions, and decisions that matter, the circulation of memes and images in the outrage of the day has already superseded the discursive role of parliamentary debate. Where he unnecessarily discards communist parties, Jameson unnecessarily accepts bourgeois ones. At any rate, since bargain ing is betrayal and persuasion doesn't work, the remaining option is coercion. Jameson takes the path of the military instead of the party because only the military can get the job done. But who makes the decisions that matter in Jameson's scheme? Who directs the military? The benefit of Trotsky's version of mili tary democracy (which Jameson invokes) is the supposition of Bolshevik leadership in civil and class war. Politics isn't erased. It takes a leading role, determining the course of military engage ment. Jameson, though, imagines a transition in which universal conscription replaces building and exercising political will. In the utopia that follows, the people remain incapable of self-govern ance, unable to steer their society themselves. They are reduced to elements of machines of work and leisure. Channeled into the military apparatus and through the Psychoanalytic Placement Bureau, the collective power of the people to determine self consciously the conditions under which they live is utterly fo re closed. Politics has no place. Rather than a communist conception of the people, then, Jameson's universal army takes to an extreme the conception of population that is operative under neoliberal DUAL POWER REDUX 119 capitalism. There is no active collective of self-governing people making their own history. There are only economic units of production and consumption. Ensconced in the "quasi-paranoid fe ar of any fo rm of political or social organization-whether in the fo rmation of political parties of one kind or another or in the speculation about the construction of future societies radically different from this one" that he diagnoses on the left since 1968, Jameson misdiagnoses symptom as cause. The problem is not that we must " cure ourselves of the habit of thinking politically. " It is that the left has stopped thinking and acting politically. Preoccupied with identity politics and culture critique (the latter ofwhich Jameson sharply addresses), the left has dissolved itself into liberals interested in including ever more of us into globalized multicultural capitalism and anarchists fo cused on the micropolitics of small group engagement. Fearful of power after the excesses of the twentieth century, the left has ceded the state to capital acting as a class. Jameson says no one wants a state any longer. This is incorrect. Corporations and the rich lay out billions in their attempts to capture the state, whether via elections or legislation. The US state deploys its murderous force worldwide to insure that its allies control their states. Jameson seeks to circumvent the challenge of building political power by relying on coercion and eliminating the political altogether. But the political cannot be eliminated. What changes is its mode of expression, the fo rms it takes. In fact, contra Jameson, the object of political theory has always been conflict, not the collective as such. The scandal of Marxism, and perhaps even of democracy, is the demand that conflict and connectivity be thought together.

Another Party

Jameson's universal military substitutes the organization of the population fo r the people as the collective political subject. 120 JODI DEAN

Everyone is conscripted into a single organization. This organiza tion is not a vehicle fo r their subjectivity as a collective. It is a machine fo r their productivity, anchored in the dissolution of their collective subjectivity insofar as there is no site where they repre sent themselves to themselves as a collective. In contrast, the party mobilizes a divide within the people. It is a form for a part that struggles on behalf of that part. Not all of the society is included within it. The non-identity between people and party enables each to be more and less than what they are, each to enable, rupture, and exceed the other. Differently put, the party mobilizes the people as a divided subject. The Lacanian concepts important fo r Jameson's own argument help clarify this idea. That the subject of politics is collective means that its actions cannot be reduced to those associated with individual agency, actions like choice or decision. Instead, the collective subject impresses itself through ruptures and breaks and the retroactive attribution of these breaks to the subject they expressed.17 The punctuality of the people as a collective subject could suggest that it is only evental, only disruptive, utterly disconnected from any body, creation, institution, or advance and thus without substance or content. But this would ignore the persistence of the subject in the press of the unrealized. This persistence needs a body, a carrier. Without a carrier, it dissipates into the manifold of poten tiality. Nevertheless, with a carrier some potentiality is dimin ished. Some possibility is eliminated. Some closure is effected. This loss is the subject's condition of possibility, the division constitutive of subjectivity. Political fo rms-parties, states, guerrilla armies, even leaders-situate themselves within this division. Although they can be and often are fetishized

17 See Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans. by Bruno Bosteels, London: Continuum, 2009. For an elaboration of the theory of the party in terms of its fidelity to the egalitarian discharge of the crowd, see my Crowds and Party, London: Verso, 2016. DUAL POWER REDUX 121

(positioned so as to obscure the loss or to remedy it perfectly, as with Jameson's universal army), the fact of fetishization should not deflect fr om the prior condition of the gap and its occupation. The role of the party isn't to reveal to the working class the truth of its desire. Nor is it to represent the interests of the working class on the terrain of politics. Rather, the fu nction of the party is holding open a gap in our setting so as to enable a collective desire fo r collectivity. 18 "Through such a gap or moment," Daniel Bensa'id writes, "can arise the unaccomplished fact, which contra dicts the fatality of the accomplished fa ct."19 The crowd's breach of the predictable and given creates the possibility that a political subject might appear. The party steps into that breach and fights to keep it open fo r the people. To the extent that it is faithful to egali tarian discharge of the crowd event, the party is a communist party (in this vein, Marx heralded the Paris Commune as a glorious achievement of our party). The psychoanalytic concept of transference depends on and expresses the gap constitutive of subjectivity. In the clinic, the transference registers the effects of an Other beyond analyst and analysand. The analytic relation is not reducible to the interaction between them. Rather, the transference reveals unconscious processes and perspectives contained within the Other. The space of the Other is a crowded, heterogeneous space, a mix of shifting feelings, pressures, and attachments. It has structural fe atures, dynamic fe atures, processes that advance and recede, flow into one another, and shift in importance. Multiple, differentfigures inhabit and en-form these structures and processes.

18 For an account of communist desire in terms of the collective desire fo r collectivity, see The Communist Horizon. 19 Daniel Bensai'd, "Leaps! Leaps! Leaps!" in Lenin Reloaded, edited by Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj Zizek, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007, 158. 122 JODI DEAN

Transference contributes to a theory of the party in the precise sense of a "mode of access to what is hidden in the unconscious." The party accesses the discharge that has ended, the crowd that has gone home, the people who are not there but exert a force nonethe less. It is a site of transferential relations. The production of the collective space of the party as a knot of transferential effects is the way people are changed through struggle, the way they maintain a gap in capitalism between its determinations and the political space of their self-determination. Members look at themselves and their interactions from the perspective of the association they create through their association, the party as an Other space. Where Jameson proposes a machinic population organized into a univer sal army, I suggest a militant party faithful to the crowd's egalitar ian discharge. Features of the Other space that Lacan highlights include the ideal ego, the ego ideal, and the superego. As Zizek explains, Lacan gives a very precise inflectionto these Freudian terms:

"Ideal" ego stands fo r the idealized self-image of the subject (the way I would like to be, the way I would like others to see me); Ego-Ideal is the agency whose gaze I try to impress with my ego image, the big Other who watches over me and impels me to give my best, the ideal I try to fo llow and actualize; and superego is this 20 same agency in its vengeful, sadistic, punishing aspect.

The ideal ego is how the subject imagines itself. The ego ideal is the point fr om which the subject looks at itself. And the superego is the judge that torments the subject as it points out its inevitable, unavoidable failure to achieve either of these ideals. These three points are tied together: the ego ideal verifies the image of the subject. Since the ego ideal is supposed to provide this verification, the subject has certain investments in it. The subject needs the ego

20 Slavoj Zizek, How to Read Lacan, New York: Norton, 2006, 80. DUAL POWER REDUX 123 ideal for its stability or sense of autonomy. Because of this need, it is resistant to recognizing that the ego ideal is nothing but a struc tural effectand resentful of the ego ideal's simultaneous power and inadequacy. Moreover, in trying to live up to the expectations of the ego ideal, the subject may compromise its own desire. It may give up too much, which explains why the superego can exert such an extreme, unrelenting force: it is punishing the subject fo r this betrayal. 21 While these features of the space of the Other may appear indi vidual, this appearing is nothing but a Freudian residuum. Not only are the fe atures common, but they attest to the workings of collectivity that Freud encloses in the individual psyche. Such features operate in all collectives, as groups compete with other groups as well as look at themselves fr om the perspective of other groups. Cities and nations, schools and parties all have self conceptions formatted via the processes and perspectives of the Other. The transference that takes place in psychoanalysis reveals two additional fe atures of the Other space: the subject supposed to know and the subject supposed to believe.22 These elements are configur ing suppositions within the subject (again, which is necessarily collective), structural features that the subject posits as supports fo r its desire. The subject supposed to know is the figure that holds the secret to desire. It knows the truth. God, Socrates, and Freud, as well as institutional roles, such as parent, teacher, and priest, can function as such a locus of knowledge for and of a subject. Consider, fo r example, the opening of an editorial written by journalist Paul Mason in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis:

One of the upsides of having a global elite is that at least they know what's going on. We, the deluded masses, may have to wait fo r

21 Ibid., 81. 22 Ibid., 28-9. 124 JODI DEAN

decades to find out who the paedophiles in high places are; and which banks are criminal, or bust. But the elite are supposed to know in real time-and on that basis to make accurate predictions. 23

Mason presents the global elite as the subject supposed to know. Not only do the elite know the obscene truths of pedo philia and expropriation, but they know them as they happen, "in real time," while the rest of us remain deluded. A persis tent question fo llowing the economic crisis of 2007 and 2008 was why the elite didn't know. How come no one saw the crisis coming? Zizek introduces the subject supposed to believe as a more fundamental version of the subject supposed to know.24 He explains:

There is no immediate, self-present living subjectivity to whom the belief embodied in "social things" can be attributed, and who is then dispossessed of it. There are some beliefs, the most fu ndamental ones, which are fr om the very outset "decentered" beliefs of the Other; the phenomenon of the "subject supposed to believe" is thus universal and structurally necessary. 25

The subject supposed to believe refers to this unavoidable displacement of belief onto some other. Concrete versions include the maintenance of the fiction of Santa Claus for the sake of children or the positing of some ordinary person who

23 Paul Mason, "The Best of Capitalism Is Over fo r Rich Countries and fo r the Poor Ones It Will Be Over by 2060," Guardian, July 7, 2014. 24 Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Ohject of Ideology, London: Verso, 1989, 185. Elsewhere Zizek treats the subject supposed to believe "as the fundamen tal, constitutive feature of the symbolic order": The Plague of Fantasies, London: Verso, 1997, 106. 25 Zizek, Plague of Fantasies, I 06. DUAL POWER REDUX 125 believes in community values. Zizek emphasizes the asymme try between the subject supposed to know and the subject supposed to believe. Belief is reflective, a belief that another believes. He writes: "'I still believe in Communism' is the equivalent of saying 'I believe there are still people who believe in Communism."'26 Because belief is belief in the belief of the other, one can believe through another. Someone else can believe for us. Knowledge is different. That the other knows does not mean that I know. I can only know for myself. No wonder, then, that a frequent refrain in contemporary capitalist ideology is that each should find out for herself. Capitalism relies on our separation fr om one another, so it does its best to separate and individuate us at every turn. Although he invokes Lacanian concepts, Jameson reduces the space of the Other to the phenomenon of envy. Absent fr om his characterization of the universal army is any discussion of the military in its functioning as either ideal ego, ego ideal, or super ego. How do its members imagine themselves? From what perspec tive do they see? How is their enjoyment structured? These are political questions irreducible to the cultural field insofar as the answers to them are inseparable fr om the collective 's self-identity. The army's social role as the collective 's working back on itself as a collective, as not simply the entirety of working people but as the people working as universal army, however, does not appear in Jameson's account. Indeed, this effectof collectivity cannot appear because its appearance requires the gap of the political, the torsion of reflexivity. The military does not provide a perspective that the people take toward themselves; nor do the collective people, reduced in Jameson's account to the population, provide a perspec tive on the military. The two collapse into each other, no symbolic space between them. To be sure, there is one feature of the Other space fo r which

26 Ibid., 107. 126 JODI DEAN

Jameson makes room: the subject supposed to know. More than assigning occupations and managing group therapy, the Psychoanalytic Placement Bureau, with its unimaginably complex computers, concentrates in a single location the symbolic fu nction of the big Other as that site where actions register. Nevertheless, how these actions register, what they register as, is immunized fr om collective redress or response-that is to say, from politiciza tion. At most, it's a site of mass investment, the continuation of the Internet's service as a zero institution: at least somebody knows what's going on.27 Institutions are symbolic arrangements that organize and concentrate the social space. They "fix" an Other, not in the sense of immobilizing it but in the sense of putting in relation the emer gent effects of sociality. This "putting in relation" substantializes the social link, giving it its fo rce, enabling it to exert its pressure. A party is an organization and concentration of sociality in behalf of a certain politics. For communists this is a politics of and for the proletarianized, the producers, the oppressed, the people as the rest of us. "Party" knots together within the horizon of commu nism the effectsof ideal ego, ego ideal, superego, "subject supposed to know," and "subject supposed to believe." The particular content of any of these component effects changes over time and place, even as the operations they designate remain as elements of party association. The ideal ego in communist parties is typically imagined in terms of the good comrade. The good comrade may be a brave militant, skilled organizer, accomplished orator, or loyal func tionary. The ego ideal is the point from which comradeship is assessed: How and to what end is bravery, skill, accomplishment and loyalty counted? The party superego incessantly charges us fo r failing on all fr onts-we never do enough-even as it taunts us

27 For a discussion of the web as a zero institution, see Democracy and Other Ne oliheral Fantasies. DUAL POWER REDUX 127

with the sacrifices we make fo r the sake of the party-we have always done too much. Each of these positions can be varyingly open and closed, coherent or contradictory. Insofar as the party is situated in an antagonistic field, insofar as it is not the state but is a part, other ideals and injunctions enter the mix: this is class struggle within the party, the challenge presented by capitalist consciousness. At the same time, the situatedness of the party means that the space it provides necessarily exerts effectsbeyond party members, providing images and reference points fo r those who might join, fo r allies and fellow travelers, as well as fo r fo rmer members or enemies. The ideas of" subject supposed to believe" and "subject supposed to know" are particularly useful for thinking about these effects beyond party members. Critics of the communist party chastise the party fo r claiming to know, fo r functioning as a location of scientific or revolutionary knowledge. This ostensible expertise has been derided not only as monopolistic but also as false: the knowledge of living with, responding to, and fighting against oppressive power belongs to the people and cannot be confined into a set of iron laws of historical development. Given this critique, which came to be widely shared on the left in the wake of '68, it's surprising that the collapse of the Soviet Union dealt such a mortal blow to communist and socialist organizing in the United States, United Kingdom, and Europe. By 1989, only a tiny few defended the Soviet Union anymore. Most agreed that its bureau cracy was moribund and that it needed to institute market reforms. Why, then, did its collapse have such an effect? The "subject supposed to believe" makes sense of this strange reaction. What was lost when the USSR fell apart was the subject onto whom belief was transposed, the subject through whom others believed. Once this believing subject was gone, it really appeared that communism was ideologically defeated. As a fu rther example, we might consider the prototypical accounts of Communist Party officialswith their dachas and privileges. These functioned less as 128 JODI DEAN factual exposes than as attacks on the subject supposed to believe: not even the Party believes in Communism. Where the attacks failed, however, is in the fact that they were waged at all. Insofar as they had a target, they affirmed its ongoing function as the subject supposed to believe. The flawed, desiccated Party could still believe fo r us. Once it utterly collapsed, we lost the Other through whom we could believe. I've been drawing out what's missing in Jameson's program and utopian proposal: the missing symbolic space of the Other. I've emphasized political dimensions of this loss, particularly with regard to the loss of the gap necessary fo r reflection, judgment, and critique. Jameson presents his army as an economic organiza tion. It doesn't open the world. Its activities fulfill material needs, particularly the need fo r employment. Perhaps it is here, then, where we can locate the key difference between military organiz ing and party organizing. Party organizing breaks with the world given by production. It occupies the political gap between what is given and what could be. The party is a body fo r collective strug gle fo r something more than provisioning. It presumes struggle and takes a side, fighting to change the world. Raphael Samuel's memoir of British Communism in the 1930s illustrates my point. Samuel describes British Communists as engaged in an "an endless round of activity that left them very little personal time."28 Treated as a good in itself, activity not only envel oped members deeply and daily in political work but also installed in them a sense of urgency: what they were doing had to be done; it was vital, necessary,urge nt. Good Communists involved themselves in a wide variety of day-to-day struggles. The Party held meetings, rallies, and membership drives. It published and distributed a wide array of literature. It organized demonstrations, mobilized strike

28 Raphael Samuel, Th e Lost Wo rld of British Communism, London: Verso, 2006, 36. The book is comprised of three essays originally published in Ne w Left Review between 1985 and 1987. DUAL POWER REDUX 129 support, carried out emergency protests. Committed to direct action and immediate struggle, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) planned campaigns, developing systems and processes fo r making its actions more efficient, fo r following up, and fo r self-assessment. It worked to concentrate its resources and energies so that it would "seem more powerful than it was." It reviewed tasks, prepared agendas and drew up committees. Members were more than members. They had practical positions and responsibilities far beyond those given to them by their place in capitalism. They had specialized roles such that each was always more than him- or herself. Each was also someone in the Party: organizer, bureau member, instructor, trainer, branch officer,prop agandist, literature seller, delegate, agitator. Related to this, Samuel says, "was a positive mania fo r reports which served both as an elaborate system of tutelage and as a method of accountability."29 Reporting installed a practice of looking at activity fr om the perspective of the Party. Samuel describes Communist organizational passion in detail, treating it as a series of disciplines of the faithful-efficiencyin the use of time, solemnity in the conduct of meetings, rhythm and symmetry in street marches, statistical precision in the preparation of reports. What comes through in his account is the affective register of organization. Organization is not just a matter of bureaucracy and control. It's a generator of enthusiasm,an appara tus of intensification that ruptures the everyday by breaking with spontaneism. Planning is a matter of collective mindfulness. Samuel writes, "To be organized was to be the master rather than the creature of events. In one register it signified regularity, in another strength, in yet another control."30 Organization produced a shared sense of strength, of a collective with the capacity to carry out its will.

29 Ibid., 106. 30 Ibid., 103. JODI DEAN

The Party meeting connected the local, the immediate, with world-historical events ("think globally, act locally" was commu nist practice long before it became an activist slogan). Unlike the moves to the personal and political that often disrupt political discussions in an individualist age, comrades drew strength fr om seeing themselves in a larger setting, fr om recognizing that, rather than being unique, they were typical, generic. The particular was a bog, a swampy morass in which a group could get stuck and out ofwhich it would have to be pulled. Lessons could then be learned, conclusions drawn, and plans made. Meetings broadened lives by opening them to the political, attaching them to movements and tendencies that took them out of miserable isolation. The world didn't simply happen to communists. They fought to make the world one way rather than another. Samuel observes that much Party activity was "less instrumen tal than expressive."31 Organization had a fantastic dimension, buttressing illusions of control, expressing dreams of power and efficacy as capable of being fulfilled. If weakness was a matter of failures of organization, then strength would accrue as these were corrected. To the extent that organization enabled members of the CPGB to imagine their party as shaping the world, they could believe in what they were doing whether or not their rallies and Daily Wo rker headlines corresponded to any actually significant political influence. But even with this acknowledgement, Samuel rightly refuses to allow the cynical, dismissive, and defeatist atti tude of a contemporary left that looks at the world from the perspective of capitalism to fill in the gap of possibility that British Communists were able to maintain. He continues to see from the perspective of the Party. The Party, shortcomings and all, provides an ego ideal or symbolic point fr om which he views actions as momentous. The Party sustains the perspective it provides such that agitating against imperialism in a colonial society,

31 Ibid., 120. DUAL POWER REDUX campaigning against fascism, keeping alive the housing question, and supporting twenty years of Hunger Marches would manifest the heroic work of energetic comrades, communism in the actual ity of political movement. Multiple activities are not a differenti ated pluralism of possibilities but a singular communist politics, envisioned as and from the perspective of the enduring struggle of the masses. Samuel's account of Party activity isn't unique to the CPGB. It resonates with the experiences of US Communists. Vivian Gornick writes,

For thousands of Communists, being a Communist meant years of selling the Daily Wo rker, running offmimeographed leaflets, speak ing on street corners, canvassing door-to-door fo r local and national votes, organizing neighborhood groups fo r tenants' rights or welfare rights or unemployment benefits, raising money fo r the Party or fo r legal defenses or bail bonds or union struggles. Only that and nothing more.32

What Gornick calls the "grinding ordinariness" of the life of Party members in the United States, like that in the United Kingdom, involved ceaseless activity. Gornick presents the dream of resolu tion as external to this activity. But it wasn't the vision that sustained the activity. The activity sustained the vision. Consistent activity on behalf of a politics-particularly planning, meetings, and reports-generated the perspective of the Party that enabled it. Consistency made it possible fo r the everyday to feel momen tous, for neighborhood matters to become more than their imme diacy, to become vehicles transmitting the sense of the world. Organization and its symbolization concentrated collective senti ment into a fo rm other than the deprivations of capital and state,

32 Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism, New York: Basic Books, 1977, 109-10. JODI DEAN enabling people to see themselves and the world fr om the perspec tive of a gap in the given, a gap of hope and possibility. To solve an economic problem, unemployment, Jameson's utopian proposal eliminates the political sphere. Since representa tive government cannot effectively address unemployment, or numerous other problems, it withers away, replaced by the popu lation conscripted into a universal army. In his utopian proposal, a machinic population is compelled to work. The sphere of culture provides a space for creativity, diversion, relief, drugs, whatever (it doesn't matter). Unimaginably complex computers and a kind of collective group therapy, consolidated into the site of the Psychoanalytic Placement Bureau, provide the single locus of collective symbolic registration, an amalgam of "union and hospi tal, an employment office and a court, a market research agency, a polling bureau and a social welfare center." The people do not and cannot appear as a collective subject. To the extent that utopian proposals pull out features of the given, arranging them so that we can see our own tendencies differently, Jameson's "American utopia" is effective. It puts before us a society in which the political has been replaced by computers and therapy, and collective action has been displaced by work and leisure. For a left that refuses the political-that rejects the state, abandons the party, betrays the crowd, and mistrusts the people-this is what utopia looks like. 4

The Happy Accident of a Utopia

Sara} Giri

We can start with one basic insight crucial to Fredric Jameson's notion of utopia. He states, "The new cannot simply replace the old but must develop within it somehow, ultimately discarding the old ways like a husk or shell (as Marx put it)." Further, "it is always a delicate matter, in utopianizing, to distinguish between the utopian modification of reality and the symbolic replication of what already exists." There is a strong sense that not only will the new develop within the old, but the old can also continue-"the symbolic replication of what already exists." The new then comes fr om the fact that now even the old will rearticulate a new fo rm. Hence, rather than making "global critiques of what we may call ideological beliefs-free market fu ndamentalism," Jameson is more interested in unpacking "praxis and daily life, habit and performance" that articulate capital ism. From the "old," from today's capitalist society, particularly neoliberalism, Jameson singles out "commitment to efficiency as a fu ndamental value." It is easy to show that the ideology of efficiency 134 SAROJ GIRl is connected to free market fundamentalism or austerity. Indeed, we might reject this commitment to efficiency. But "even if we succeed in removing the value of efficiency from our utopian anxieties, however, the larger issue of creativity remains to be addressed." Efficiencymust be grasped without dissolving the element of creativity. Similarly, we must understand the entrepre neur as comprising two sides: the inventor, creative and genius-like, and the businessperson, exploiter of the invention. So creativity and the inventor can continue in the utopian society. This means that "genius" fo r design can be detached from capi talist logic: it would no longer appear as the instrumentalist drive fo r efficiency. This genius "can be imagined as a motivation and a satisfaction in its own right, not particularly affected in its logic by the rewards a differentkind of socioeconomic system might offer."

Brechtian refunctioning

Jameson takes this as an instance of how the new (design and genius in a post-capitalist world) cannot simply replace the old but must develop within it somehow: the old would now undergo a rearticulation in the utopian society. This would mean "we are able to repudiate efficiency in the name of other, even more progressive values": a move that can best be understood as "a crit ical reconsideration or refunctioning (Brecht's Umfunktionierung)." Similarly, Jameson subjects consumerism to such a "reconsidera tion." He finds that consumerism cannot be treated as "a psycho physical disorder," which is what "psychologism and culture critique" does. This approach overlooks the way consumerism discloses the truth "of American social life generally, the buying of fo od and care, the advertising of any number of name brands, the trappings of a whole affiuent society. " It ignores the fact consumerism is only an "appearance" concealing "a nightmarishunderlying reality." Here is the key analytical point: "It is therefore the passage through the money form that empties use value fr om the object THE HAPPY ACCIDENT OF A UTOPIA 135 in question and transforms it into a commodity, an object that can be measured abstractly against all the others of its kind." The point, then, is to do away with the structural determina tions of "consumerism." Once that happens, once the money fo rm or "money no longer plays a central role," consumerism "can be expected to wither on the vine ... consigning the passionate consumer to some more local niche in the Fourier permutational scheme." Given such a refunctionary "consum erism" can in fact continue in a revolutionary utopia. Hence Jameson is able to make this bold statement: "I have no particu lar revulsion fo r such consumption and such pleasures, whether those of consummerism or of cocaine." Brechtian refunctioning of habit and performance then is a crucial element in ensuring that the utopia is as much a modifica tion of reality as it is a symbolic replication of what exists.

Social antagonism

But once so detached from the reproductive circuits of capitalism, certain praxis and habits can exist, in the revolutionary utopia, as a "free particular," a singularity. That is, they could exist as an indi vidual trait, any kind of quirk or fantasy of an uncharted orienta tion, happily unhinged from the "base." For, after all, in this utopia it is only in the field of production, that is, "labor, material or immaterial," where "a collective project, collective life" is insisted upon. But "in the world of the super structure, no such specificationshold; the individual is as free to be a recluse as a party person, to practice hobbies or to live out exist ence as a couch potato, to be a family man or professional mother." This utopia is open to "the view of society as an ineradicable collection of neurotics." This means that a particularity can exist as a singularity and need not (a lways) articulate itselfas a universal. No wonder then that in this utopia, collectiveantag onisms mightbe eliminated, only to see "theheightening ofindividual ones." Antagonism SAROJ GIRl and not social harmony must be fully embraced,recognizing the impos sibility of the social so that the new utopia would welcome "the most outrageous self-indulgences and personal fr eedoms of its citizens in all things." It is as thoughin the midst of such outrageousindulgences and neurotic behavior, with no censoring of capitalism at the behavioral level, utopia would emerge like "a happy accident." Writes Jameson, "Like the sociologists who draw up their questionnairesby making you think they are inquiring about something else, it is best to seem to lead the patients down the wrongpath, fr om which 'self-knowledge ' rises like a distant glimpse or happy accident (assuming there can be knowl edge about something-the so-called sel£-that doesn't exist in the first place). Utopians must proceed like that." That is why Jameson rejects the idea of utopia as the "cure" or treatment. It is not a utopian solution, but a "utopian non-solution" that is being proposed. Such overindulgences and overidentifications do not, however, mean a breakdown in production. For the particular traits, habits, and praxis could also be hinged to the base, be integral to the prac tice of production. But even in that case, the service to production is carried out not through a top-down rule imposition but as a matter of habit, as "pedagogical production."

Pe dagogicalproduction

In pedagogical production rules become habit, and work is self propelled. Jameson recalls how fo r Lenin, in The State and Revolution, "socialist legality" is enforced informally, as a collec tive habit. This is a fo rm of society where "allhave learned the art of administration, and will indeed independently administer social production, will independently keep accounts, control the idlers, the gentlefolk, the swindlers and similar 'guardians of capitalist traditions.' "1 This is part of what Jameson wants to call "cultural revolution" rather than education.

Lenin, Essential Wo rks of Lenin, 349. THE HAPPY ACCIDENT OF A UTOPIA 137

The cultural revolution will possess an "intolerable negativity toward the positivist and empiricist world." Against the empirical practical, Jameson defends the "autonomy of art" and declares that "it is around the negation of every actually existing society and its practices that the vocation of art needs to be organized and defended." This is where we should also consider his approach to the dystopian fear of " discipline" in the army. Here he defends

a perpetual and perpetually exacerbating rebuke of pragmatism, the practical, the socially useful, the legal and the normative, the habit ual, law and order, and every well-behaved and traditional tenet of social reproduction, very much including, of course, that "disci pline" which constitutes the deepest dystopian fe ar of army life.

This means that production produces its own culture, but this culture is not given by production as such, or by the empirical or the practical world. It will not be ruled by practical instrumentalist reasons or by a bureaucracy. Jameson here challenges dominant interpretations of Stakhanovism or socialist realism, stating, "the mission of socialist realism [or of Stakhanovism] is the relentless critique of bureaucracy." The autonomy of art and rebuke of prag matism mean that the "universal of production" is then always as close as possible to a singular universal. Here is then the fo rmula, if you like, of Jameson's utopia: All universals are necessarilysi ngular universals, but not all singulars are (o r become) singular universals. Recall also how, as discussed above, a particularity can exist "unhinged," as a singularity, that is, with out articulating itself as a universal. It is a utopia of production, or rather pedagogical production, and also one where existentialism supersedes Marxism: "We have only reached the point in which a universal militarization permits the organization of a minimum of necessary production sufficient to satisfythe multipleneeds of a given population, from food and hous ing to educationand medical treatment,thereby liberatinga free time SAROJ GIRl unexpectedand unplanned fo r in Darwinian evolution and the natural world. This is the moment in which, as Sartre put it, existentialism supersedes Marxism as a philosophic horizon, and we can detect the nature of our own ideological reflexes by way of our reactions to it." This dual register of pedagogical production and of existential ist/superstructural fr eedom defines Jameson's utopia. A utopia that delivers full freedom in individual matters is I think one of the seminal contributions of Jameson's project. He has founda way to, as it were, ''solve " the problem of individualfre edom and democracy, without really valorizing the liberal subject as the repository of capacities that must be enhanced through rights and other endow ments-and without giving up on the need fo r production and discipline. There is, in fact, no real conflict between labor I produc tion/ necessity and culture/ democracy I freedom, fo r "in the utopian course of things labor will become embroidered with culture and the realm of freedom preoccupied with necessity."

Methodologically, Jameson's approach has three components. The first is of course the Brechtian refunctioning that we discussed above. The second is the structural approach of psychoanalysis, while the third is the topological space of the universal army.

Structuralp sychoanalysis

Jameson's psychoanalytical approach is crucial when it comes to really understanding why the fu nctional transformation (refunc tioning) can indeed detach praxis fr om the capitalist logic. With this approach, we can see that the habits and praxis do not rein fo rce themselves in a self-reinforcing circularity-that belief is not already produced in and through the material practices, through the repetition involved in rituals. THE HAPPY ACCIDENT OF A UTOPIA 139

Recall how in, say, an Althusserian approach rituals as repetitive practices produce their own beliefs. Writes Judith Butler, "The notion of ritual suggests that it is performed, and it is in the repeti tion of performance a belief is spawned."2 Jameson is clearly rejecting such an approach and seems to work with an approach developed by Slavoj Zizek and Mladen Dolar.3 According to Dolar, Althusser recognizes that "what counts is ultimately not that they [rituals] are material, but that they are ruled by a code, by a repeti tion," that "they have to be symbolically codified."4 But, Dolar points out, what "is lacking in Althusser is the conceptualization of the relationship between materiality and the Symbolic." Althusser does not recognize that "sense and subject did not spring up fr om materiality but fr om the Symbolic that regulated it," fr om what Zizek calls the "belief before belief."5 "Belief before belief" means the subject assumes there is "a subject supposed to know": the Other. "The Other exists only by the subject's belief in it, the belief that there is a subject to know."6 So here consumerism or addiction becomes, in Jameson, "an attempt, in whatever fo rm, to free the subject from the Other and fr om the mimetic hold of the Other's desire." Here "consumer goods" are "a kind of objectal medium surrounding us and isolat ing us fr om the more agonizing dilemmas posed by every concrete existence of the Other, but also of a world where isolation fr om the Other has become somehow an urgent need." Consumerism, the addiction to certain things and objects, is the result of the individual's unwillingness to accept "the psychic

2 Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997, 119. 3 Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso, 1989; Mladen Dolar, "Beyond Interpellation," Qui Parle, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Spring/ Summer 1993). 4 Dolar, "Beyond Interpellation," 91. 5 Zizek, Th e Sublime Object of Ideology, 40. 6 Dolar, "Beyond Interpellation," 89. SAROJ GIRl

alienation of the Other" and the attempt to evade this problem by succumbing to the mimetic hold of the Other's desire. But if the individual is willing to accept this alienation as a "natural" part of the human condition (in an existential mode), then it is possible to not respond to the Other's desire and free the subject fr om its hold. There is a break possible, a break not fr om the consumerist acts per se, that is, at the level of capitalist behavior, but fr om the hold of the Other's desire: a break at the level of necessity. The Brechtian refunctioning of the old elements producing the new, then, presupposes the structural approach of psychoanalysis. It is this that makes it possible fo r us to see how habits, practices, and perfomancenow can be reYersed, refunctioned without really shunning them as indiYidual acts or "behaYior, " be it consumerism or the "commitment to effi ciency. " For, as we saw, these practices do not move in a circular self-reinforcing loop: the instance of a "belief before belief" is crucial in allowing us to interrupt and reorient them in a new direction-toward a revolutionary utopia. Now it turns out, this conjunction of refunctioning and psycho analysis actually presupposes the existence of a new topological space, the universal army-these three elements together must be seen in their simultaneity.

Topological sp ace of the army

Jameson covers a lot of ground in arguing against the practice of the standing army, an army that stands apart fr om society. He calls fo r nationalizing the army. He pits the US army tradition with the European traditions of citizen militias and of the nation-in-arms of the French Revolution. He calls for "the renationalization of the army along the lines of any number of other socialist candidates fo r nationalization and by reintroducing the draft," and fo r "democratizing the army itself and inventing some new relation ship between civilian society and this fo reign body that has come into extraterritorial existence in its midst." THE HAPPY ACCIDENT OF A UTOPIA

The army proposes a form that goes beyond federating units, as in the United States. He writes, "The strength of the army is that it cuts across the federal constitution in a wholly novel way, trans gressing its boundaries and carefully drawn limits without annul ling it, leaving its map intact beneath a wholly differenttopology ." The "signal advantage of the army as a system is that it transcends that document [the Constitution] without doing away with it; it coexists with it at a different spatial level and becomes thereby a potentially extraordinary instrument in the erection of dual power." "The army is the first glimpse of a classless society." It brings us closer to "true democracy," understood as the "intolerable cohabi tation of incompatible temperaments and people who get on each other's nerves," no longer "warded off by wealth in its gated communities and walled estates."

Social promiscuity

The fo rced class promiscuity or the "forced association" of the universal army must itself, if it is not to lead us to just some kind of secular or modern nationalism, undergo a fu nctional transforma tion. That is why, unlike the national armies that we find today, the universal army posits a different topological space: "the current proposal posits a fu nctional transformation-a Brechtian refunc tioning-in which this fo rced class promiscuity becomes the produc tion of genuine classlessness and social leveling." The universal army that Jameson is proposing is that space, the "spatial matrix" (without becoming a merely transcendental matrix or an abstract grid) whereby the anonymity, classlessness, and social leveling ("social promiscuity") that the national army (already) offers will itself undergo a fu nctional transformation (refunctioning). Hence Jameson's proposal fo r the nationalization of the army and the reintroduction of the draft is to initiate a fu nctional transforma tion of the army itself. What the topological space of the army does SAROJ GIRl is to dismember the transcendental matrix of capitalism fr om the social body-where now the social body itself approached as, at base, habits and performance, identifications and investments, undergoes a Brechtian refunctioning and structural rearticulation. For if this refunctioning and rearticulation of praxis and perfor mance were really to break with or exit capitalism, it must now be "plugged into" the topological space of the universal army. Dismembering the capitalist matrix means that the necessity of consumerism (as the attempt to free oneself fr om "the mimetic hold of the Other's desire"), or the "necessity" in antagonism imposed by the theft ofjouissance (Lacan), itself gets undermined, given the new condition of "genuine classlessness and social leveling." Hence consumerism as "behavior" or individual antagonism can continue in the revolutionary utopia, without the Necessity-this Necessity being what capitalism really comes down to.

Dialectical contradiction

Here we see (a) the fu nctional transformation, (b) the rearticula tion of praxis suggested by structural psychoanalysis, and (c) the topological space of the universal army-all converge to produce a particular fo rm of society. This society is marked by the kind of relationship between the particular and the universal in which the singularities are crucial, as we noted above. But if such a vortex of society, not as "enclaves of fr eedom" or supposedly alternative "non-capitalist practices," but as a univer salist form, were to emerge, then, given the continuing existence of capitalist society, we would have a situation of dual power. Jameson invokes Lenin on dual power, but we must now point out one crucial differencewith Lenin. For Jameson, dual power exists without conflict with the official state power, so that the society of the universal army appears as a parallel fo rce: "the situation of dual power fr om which the new universal army emerges, which begins life as a parallel fo rce THE HAPPY ACCIDENT OF A UTOPIA 143 alongside the state and its official army and findsits first tasks, and indeed its vocation, in the fu lfillment of neglected social services and in a coexistence with the population of a wholly different type." Further, in such situations of dual power and "transitioning out of capitalism," "power moves to the networks to which people turn fo r practical help and leadership on a daily basis: in effect, they become an alternate government, without officiallychalleng ing the ostensibly legal structure." However, dual power, as Lenin conceives it, does not emerge parallel to the capitalist state order but actively dislodges it fr om within. Jameson points to the universal army beginning life as a parallel force, but he does not tell us at what point it will end that status and start "officially challenging the ostensibly legal struc ture." The point is that the emergence of a new society, in Lenin, has everything to do with the internal contradictions of capitalism. So Lenin would want to mobilize the power of the working class emanating fr om the internal dialectical contradiction between capital and labor. Jameson substitutes the structural approach of psychoanalysis fo r the approach of internal contradiction and dialectics, even as he upholds the Lacanian notion of social antagonism. So while he keeps the universalist emphasis intact and rightly rejects the approach of "enclaves of freedom," like that of Chiapas and even the Arab Spring and Occupy movement fo r not being able to prescribe a way to transition out of capitalism, it seems that he himself proposes a universalism, in fact, an entire fo rm of society, that exists parallel to capitalism. A utopian universalist world exists in parallel to another universalist world of capitalism. This parallel utopian universalist world is internally lucid, with praxis, habit, and performance now functionally transformed in a way that neurotic behavior or our overidentifications would happily inhabit the revolutionary utopia. And yet one wants to know if there is any way to mobilize the power within capitalism, held up in dialectical contradictions, toward such a revolutionary 144 SAROJ GIRl utopia-that is, if say the power of the working class could be the crucial link as a power that is internal to dialectical contradictions of capitalism as well as one which points to the "outside," so that now the "parallel" in dual power would only be a temporary stage and not a constitutive or ontological ground of the struggle.

''Impossible present"

To my mind, Jameson is responding to our present predicament, our position "living in the end times," when, as they say, it is easier to imagine the end of human society rather than the more modest task of ending capitalism. Here Jameson findsthat "even the remarkable revival and new effiorescenceof Marxian analyses of capitalism and its contradictions remains oddly fixated on an impossible present without any visible historical future save catastrophe." This "impos sible present" is marked by, as Maurizio Lazzarato puts it, the Indebted Man borrowing from the future, living on borrowed time, annulling the fu ture.7 Popular culture today is rife with visions of how only an apocalyptic doomsday, taking us (back) to the zero level of existence, can "restart" History.8 In such a scenario, Jameson carries out this fo rmidable task of fu rrowing deep into our present condition to see if we can reartic ulate the present fo rces and subjects in a new fashion and new fo rm. One can only work with what is there, with the banal and

7 Lazzarato dwells on how "living in a society without time, without possibility, without fo reseeable rupture, is debt," in Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the In debted Man, Los Angeles: SemioTexte, 2007, 47. 8 As a contrast, however, Andrei Platonov's novels, such as Th e Foundation Pit, can be said to assume dystopia or apocalypse as a condition fo r utopia. It is as though truly only the near-destruction of human life can allow us to escape the trap whereby any utopia we imagine is always bounded by the present, and is carrying what Jameson calls the blood guilt of the present. See Jameson's discussion on this in The Seeds of Time, Irvine: Columbia University Press, 1994, 73-128. THE HAPPY ACCIDENT OF A UTOPIA 145 the ordinary, and, who knows, to our pleasant surprise, the tide might turn-for good! Without any abstract, transcendental move, keeping us totally close to spatial determinations and our daily life and praxis, Jameson is able to suggest ways to break with the problem of the "end of temporality" without really positing temporality. He cracks open time, temporality, and the subjective figure of the universal army from within the "regime of spatiality" that we famously inhabit today. With Jameson, now, we may discover that imagining a utopia need not necessarily be apocalyp tic and destructive, as it might initially seem! This is in line with Jameson's earlier work where he argued, "History can be apprehended only through its effects, and never directly as some reified fo rce."9 He argues fo r an openness to the fo rce of all events and social phenomena. History cannot be under stood "as some new representation or 'vision,' some new content, but the fo rmal effects of what Althusser, fo llowing Spinoza, calls 'absent cause.' "10 But the fact of the matter is that we are dealing not just with "effects" but also with reified fo rce, fo r example, in the shape of the existence of the power of the bourgeoisie and the state. That is why then perhaps the exit fr om capitalism must be mediated by another (possibly revolutionary) "reified" force internal to capi talism, tied down to the capitalist contradiction: we know the working class as such a force and such a power, a power which Jameson underestimates. After all, if the existing army itself has to undergo nationalization and functional transformation, it has to break its deep bonds with the bourgeoisie and the capitalist state, and perhaps that can happen only if a power dialectically internal to capitalism can weaken the reified powers of the ruling classes. The pleasures of a "happy accident" or an accidental discovery can perhaps go hand-in-hand with those of strategic success.

9 Fredric Jameson, Th e Political Un consious, London: Routledge,2006, 88. 10 Ibid.

From the Other Scene to the Other State: Jameson's Dialectic of Dual Power

Agon Hamza

The freedom of mind or spirit is not merely an absence of dependence on an Other won outside of the Other, but won in it; it attains actuality not by fleeing fr om the Other but by over coming it. -G.W.F. Hegel'

The Structural Impossibility of the Left

It is nothing new to assert that the left, both as a theory and prac tice, is in a crisis. Even the most radical anticapitalist left operates within the capitalist horizon. Therefore, the paradox of the left is that ultimately it seems to inescapably be at the service of capital, in the sense that what Marxists traditionally believed to be bour geois ideals (formal liberty, redistribution of wealth, etc.) are now

G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclop edia of the Philosophical Sciences: Philosophy of Mind, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971, 15. AGON HAMZA the ultimate aims ofthe leftist projects themselves. In other words, the left is not capable today of even minimally disturbing the profound and complicated structure of capitalism. It seems that the most difficultaspect of the contemporary left, on both its theo retical and political levels, is located in the notion that defines it: that is, in the notion of the left itself. What does it really mean to be a leftist today? Let us distinguish between the theoretical and practical domains inspired and carried out by the left and analyze them separately. The horizon within which the organizations and practices of the left operate today are those of the struggles against neoliberalism, austerity, and racism and in favor of democratization, ecology, gay rights, multiculturalism, and so on. Theoretically, the return to socialism marks its most radical point. Without denying or down playing the importance of these struggles, however, we should claim their insufficiency insofar as no theoretical orientation can be derived therefrom. Succinctly put, the left is either engaged in false struggles, or in struggles whose field is already overdeter mined by the ruling ideology. In the last instance, we can argue that the terms and the terrain of the political and ideological struggles of the left are decided by its enemies. The case of Syriza is exemplary: while it is a radi cal left party, it set itself the aim of "saving capitalism fr om itself." Although its political and government programs are of a moderate Keynesianism, the effects of its governance are the opposite of its aims. This is why the position of communists today is rather a paradoxical one: while all the above-mentioned fields of struggles are of crucial importance, their result or outcome is the restoration of capitalism. The recent upheavals and riots in Brazil testify to this: the problem is not so much the corruption of the Workers' Party as the exhaustion of a political sequence (begun back in the sixties) in which leftism itself was structured as a defense against the dictatorship. This political sequence, with its reformist social-democratic program, has now FROM THE OTHER SCENE TO THE OTHER STAT E 149 come to an end, and it is to this exhaustion of the left that the ambivalent new riots testify. 2 The first emancipatory step, the condition sine qua non fo r any politics of emancipation today, is therefore to abandon the notion and the concept of the left. No matter how paradoxical it might appear, we must maintain that the left is an obstacle to the univer sal emancipation, perhaps to a comparable degree to capitalism itself. It is both a demoralized and demoralizing ideology and political fo rce. While it remains associated with the image of its past struggles and victories, the left carries none of the organiza tional and political potency it had before. For leftism which is not communist (and the left, radical or not, seldom is communist), emancipation has very clear borders: they are always national. The emblematic examples are not only the Latin American social ist governments, but also the European left parties, such as Syriza, Podemos, and so fo rth. Alongside abandoning this term as an identifying mark, we need to cease seeking to identify ourselves through those political practices associated with it, such as the critique of neoliberalism and participation in human rights strug gles-no matter how important these struggles remain, we should stop considering them both the principal contradiction of capital and the principal unification principle of emancipatory politics. We seem to have fo rgotten Marx's basic lesson: capitalism as a social and economic fo rmation is based on a constant self-revolu tionization: that is, it only establishes limits to itself in order to valorize the crossing of these national and cultural borders. The principal problem of capitalism is not in neoliberalism or in austerity politics, nor in new fo rms of authoritarian or apartheid regimes, nor in sexism, homophobia, racism, and so on, but in the capitalist fo rm itself: that is, in the value form. Instead of referring to neoliberalism as the cause fo r our plights and misery, we should (at the risk of sounding archaic) bring back the critique and the

2 Paulo Arantes, 0 novo tempo do mundo, Sao Paulo: Boitempo, 2015. AGON HAMZA overcoming of capital as the ultimate goal of our thinking and actions. In the current conjuncture, in which capitalism is successfully neutralizing all possible resistances and alternatives to it, Slavoj Zizek's reversal of going back fr om Marx to Hegel gains its relevance. In the terms of conjuncture, we 're closer to the Hegelian rather than the Marxian universe. While Marx was writing on a revolutionary situation (1848), identifying and theorizing the contradictions that might lead to the revolution, Hegel was mostly concerned with the effects of the revolution in the postrevolutionary situation. We are in a similar conjuncture: the period of the socialist revolutions is over and capitalism has become a global system. The socialist era is over, and we need to radically rethink the idea of communism. Marx's famous response to Proudhon's The Philosophy ofPoYerty was to return the message in its inverted fo rm: The PoYerty of Philosophy. Today, when the value of thinking has become itself measured by the standards of the incessant activity and production that organize all forms of labor, it might be time to supplement Marx's position. The crisis of the left is no longer the crisis of ideal ism, of a "poor" philosophy disconnected fr om the material basis that conditions it-ours is a poverty of philosophy, a blatant absence of any fo rm of thinking subtracted from the imperative of compulsive activity. A "return to philosophy" has, then, a double role today: one, it is a means to reinvent the critical powers needed in order to transform the world; and two, it is the first movement of constructing something that has no place in our world. Furthermore, the decision to affirmthe critical and transforma tive power of philosophical thinking also allows us to shed light on our contemporary predicament from a renewed perspective, as the crisis of the left, more than the crises of capitalism, becomes our main concern. Considered from the standpoint of our "poverty of philosophy," it suddenly becomes possible to recognize the impos ture at the heart of some of our diagnoses of our enemies and struggles: fo r example, the supposition, shared by most of the left FROM THE OTHER SCENE TO THE OTHER STAT E 151 today, that we live in postideological times, in which all that is left fo r us to do is to act, or-in its most current version-the idea that "neoliberalism" names our true enemies, a conclusion that all too comfortably allows us to bypass producing new critical resources and therefore confronting our current lack of any robust concep tual fr amework, given that our adversary is conveniently cut off fr om its complex political-economic grounding. Paradoxically, today, the impasse of philosophy alone marks the left's most important tasks: to develop a more profound and comprehensive account of the left's fa ilures in the twentieth century and to think the problem of political organization anew. The problem is, to paraphrase Zizek, how are we to revolution ize an economic and political system which itself is revolutionary? Or, in the terms of Kurz and Postone: wherefrom are we to think this political process if the contradiction between the left and capi talism is overdetermined by capital itself?

The necessity of the utopian dream

The most utopic idea today is, therefore, the dream of overcoming capitalism itself. However, equally utopic is the idea that capital ism will go on indefinitely, as the only viable form of social organi zation. A serious diagnosis of the present, fr om a communist standpoint, is thus confronted with the apocalyptic scenario of an omnipotent and impotent world system-a capitalist world that is perfectly adequate to the simultaneously absurd and incipient expectations of the contemporary left. It is in view of this diagnosis that we can measure the ultimate importance of Fredric Jameson's The American Utopia. At the same time, this diagnosis is itself part of the nature and the charac ter of his utopian vision, since it relies on the confrontation with the impossibility of our situation. Which is to say, it intervenes in our impotence to even dream of a postcapitalist organization of AGON HAMZA societies. The material fo rce of the capitalist ideologies 1s so powerful that it is structuring our imaginations. Are we simply confronted with the poverty of imagination (and, perhaps in the same mode, the poverty of philosophy and of poli tics), or we are confronted with political cynicism? Zizek's rever sal of Marx's fo rmula, "They don't know it, but they are doing it," is prevalent: "The illusion is not on the side of knowledge, it is already on the side of reality itself, of what the people are doing."3 We all know what is wrong with global capitalism, nothing shocks us any longer, but nonetheless we act as if ... In this sense, the traditional art of the critique of ideology is not productive any longer: there is nothing to expose, unmask, or demystify, because everything is already exposed and open. It is this "cynical reason" that Jameson is also trying to confront. Since ideology sustains late global capitalism, we need to reinvent not only the notion of ideology but also the procedure fo r its critique. In this enterprise, the limits of "traditional" Marxism are clearly visible. The standard opposition of ideology to science, character istic of Althusser's work, is in the last instance an ideological posi tion, in the sense that, rather than produce a constructive political vision, we merely "borrow" the constructive capacities of science, remaining ourselves without any proper political orientation. In order to reconstruct a political imagination, we need not only the critique of ideology, but the political inventiveness that fixates itself in the tableaux of utopic constructions. In this regard, we have (at least) two visions or understandings of utopia. The first is the negative conception, in which a utopia is first of all an ideal: that is, where imagination, at the service of reproducing present conditions, supplements dire reality with an impossible promise of a future that renders the present bearable. It is a negative vision not merely in the sense of being ideologically overdetermined: there are many Marxists, especially those ready

3 Slavoj Zizek, Th e Sublime Ohject of Ideology, London: Verso, 1989, 32. FROM THE OTHER SCENE TO THE OTHER STAT E 153 to reintroduce Christianity and "ethical socialism" into Marxism, who see this impossible fu ture as a positive and useful guiding star, in a sort of substitute fo r moral law. The second view of utopia, however, fo und fo r example in Karl Mannheim's analysis of Thomas Miintzer's political organization, considers utopia to be the production and channeling of the people 's unreal expectations of current social life.4 Here it is not the content of utopia that counts, but its fo rm: the utopic fo rm guarantees the "bottom-up" circulation of all those unsatisfiedand unsatisfiableexpectations of the working class. In other words, like in the case of Kafka'sjo sephine the Singer, or the Mo use Folk, a utopia is a performative component that channels the fo rce of organization, it is a tool for critique: through its narrative articula tion of our forms of suffering, in the form of a future where they are institutionally addressed, it also contributes to the consistency of our critical fo rce in the present. To each ofthese conceptions of utopia there corresponds a concept of politics: the first, "regulative" conception considers utopic think ing to be a rhetorical device in the political struggle toward a given aim; the second, "formal" conception considers politics as the domain of fo rms of life, of organization that is not merely a means to an end but an end in itself. One should also understand Jameson's project in this way: a positive conceptualization of a utopian vision that is alsoa political intervention in what he calls cynical reason as a fo rm of ideology. It is in these terms that we should judge Jameson's proposal: not by its practicability or possibility, but by the effects it has on contemporary political thinking as such. In other words, his utopia should be read as a political strategy and utopian program that aims at drawing radical lines of demarcation within today's political impotence and ideological confusion, through constr�ctive rather than purely critical procedures.

4 See Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An In troduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, New York: Mariner Books, 1955. 154 AGON HAMZA

Jameson's utopian vision, however, is peculiar fo r the simple fact that from his endeavours to define what utopia is, he set himself t.o creating his own utopia.5 Jameson himself is not certain whether he is proposing a utopian vision fo r society or a political program, but that should not be our concern at this point. In the present world, the existing economic and social relations are so shattered (poverty, unemployment, violence, exclusion, and so on) that any talk about political change is either doomed to fail or be discredited as utopian (i.e., totalitarian). In a period of profound crisis of the left, the fact that Jameson has moved from the negative critique of capitalism to providing a "positive program" (or idea) is of tremendous importance. Jameson once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. 6 Today we should amend this dictum and argue that it seems to be easier to truly end the world than to end capi talism. In this sense, the utopia, understood in Jameson's terms as an operation that aims at exposing the limits of our imagina tion and reality, is the political slogan and program of our predic ament. The relation between utopia and politics is not only unre solved but, at a certain level of analysis, presents the crux of our situation. It is in this sense that we should understand Jameson's utopia as his version of the communist program.

Bureaucratic Ve rsus Political Form of Life

The most important contribution of Jameson's project is to show that his fundamental dialectic of utopia and ideology is

5 See, fo r example, Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, London: Verso, 2005. 6 Fredric Jameson, "The Future City, " Ne w LeftReview 21, May-June 2003. FROM THE OTHER SCENE TO THE OTHER STATE 155 also connected to the dialectics of single and dual power and to the overcoming of this duality. One aspect of this duality is that between communists and anarchists-that is, between the poli tics of determination versus the politics of indetermination. Anarchists, holding to the politics of indetermination, right fully criticize communists fo r being incapable of preserving the space fo r the useless dimension of subjectivity in their determi nate vision of the future, while the lack of such a determinate view prevents anarchism fr om producing a constructive eman cipatory project fo r the masses. On the other hand, communists, thinking politics from the standpoint of determination, correctly argue that the anarchists are capable neither of thinking the principal contradiction of capitalism in its systemic fo rm nor of conceiving a fo rm of organization capable of countering it, while the lack of such indeterminate space prevents communists from properly engaging with the contemporary masses, who no longer identify themselves as workers. One should also note that there are anarchist elements in the work of Marx himself, such as his famous call to "imagine, fo r a change, an association of fr ee men, working with the means of production held in common."7 Every anarchist can identify with this. However, what concerns us is the relation of the producers with "their labor and the products of their labor ...in production as well as in distribution."8 In Marx's understanding, this division depends on the fo rm of social organization of production and the respec tive social order. At one level, Zizek, Badiou, Ranciere, Karatani, etc., are all preoccupied with overcoming the duality of communism and anarchism. Or, more precisely, in a situation in which occupying the state is not a guarantee of transforming it, these contemporary Marxist thinkers are concerned with recuperating dual-power

7 Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, London: Penguin, 1976, 171. 8 Ibid., 172. AGON HAMZA

strategies as a means to disrupt the one power composed by the alliance between capital and the state. Let me briefly point out the main positions of some of the Marxist philosophers on this issue. Alain Badiou argues that "Marxism, the workers' movement, mass democracy, Leninism, the proletarian party, the socialist state-all these remarkable inventions of the twentieth century-are no longer of practical use. "9 He maintains that the third sequence of the communist hypothesis, the situation in which we findourselves now, is not a question of a proletarian party, nor of a mass move ment as bearer of this hypothesis. We find, according to Badiou, a new relationship between the ideology and a political movement. The generic processes are neither "resisting" the state nor trying to take it, but by taking a distance toward the state. It is a dual power that claims to be more universal and more powerful than the state itself-a sort of immanent duality that, though dual, remains more immanent to the situation than the transcendental unity of the capitalist state. Kojin Karatani proposes to simultaneously create a dual-power movement, through alternative common currencies and markets, and take over the state/ capital. In Karatani's view, the triad of capital-nation-state is inseparable; as such, the three ought to be revolutionized together. His solution, as we will see later, is the transformation of the modes of exchange. Zizek, on the other hand, proposes that the party should be conceived as another power (which is not the state, hence dual power) but also that it should become the state (one power). For him, the dichotomy of either the struggle fo r state power or withdrawal from and/ or resistance against state power is a false alternative. According to Zizek, this alternative presupposes the premise that the state in its actual fo rm is perpetual. Zizek's wager is that we need a Leninist gesture: the ultimate aim of the revolution is not only simply to take state power, but also to use revolutionary violence

9 Alain Badiou, Th e Meaning of Sarkoty, London: Verso, 2008, 113. FROM THE OTHER SCENE TO THE OTHER STATE 157 in radically transforming it. As he puts it, we should make the state work in a "non-statal way."10 Finally, Jameson suggests a very concrete proposition through which the state/ capital apparatus would gradually become the "smaller" of the two powers, when compared with the military complex, which would grow progressively more central. Jameson's idea is a militarized version of Zizek's tetrad of people-movement party-leader. Jameson departs fr om Lenin's short text "The Dual Power," written in April 1917, during the coexistence of the Provisional Government and the Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies. Lenin designates three main fe atures of the Soviet coun cils: 1) power comes fr om below, that is, fr om the people in their areas ("direct seizure"); 2) in the soviets, the police and army are replaced by arming the workers and peasants directly; and 3) the bureaucracy is organized similarly to the armed fo rces-not by elected officials, but by direct rule of the people. In a sense, Lenin also provides a militarized version of the soviets.11 Jameson's idea is simple-but, as Brecht noted, it is only the simple things that are so difficultto do: to inscribe the whole of the American people in the American army complex. The basic prem ise of his utopia is strictly Marxist: withering away of the state and, with the state, of politics as such. For Jameson, the state is the field of politics. As he puts it, "It should be obvious that the withering away of the state inevitably brings with it the withering away of that thinking whose object is essentially the state as such (the polis)." By doing so, the two levels of social order that have been traditionally thought of as the base and superstructure, that is, the realms of production and of culture, will take on a wholly new dimension through increasing the distance between them. This poses a very important problem that weighs heavily on the Marxist

10 Slavoj Zizek, "How to Begin from the Beginning?" in The Idea of Communism,edited by C. Douzinas and S. Zizek, London: Verso, 2010. 11 V.I. Lenin, "The Dual Power," 1917, marxists.org. AGON HAMZA tradition. As with Marx's and Lenin's analyses of the transition from capitalism to socialism, Jameson is preoccupied with what he elsewhere calls the "persistence of childbirth." If we recall the famous passages on the "Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation" from Marx's Capital, where he talks about monop oly capitalism and expropriating the expropriators:

The monopoly of capital becomes a fe tter upon the mode of produc tion, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization oflabor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.12

Further, Lenin argued that imperialism is capitalism in decay, or in transition:

When a big enterprise assumes gigantic proportions, and, on the basis of an exact computation of mass data, organizes according to plan the supply of primary raw materials to the extent of two-thirds, or three-fourths, of all that is necessary fo r tens of millions of people; when the raw materials are transported in a systematic and organized manner to the most suitable places of production, some times situated hundreds or thousands of miles fr om each other; when a single center directs all the consecutive stages of processing the material right up to the manufacture of numerous varieties of finished articles; when these products are distributed according to a single plan among tens and hundreds of millions of consumers (the marketing of oil in America and Germany by the American oil trust)-then it becomes evident that we have socialization of production, and not mere "interlocking," that private economic and

12 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 929. FROM THE OTHER SCENE TO THE OTHER STAT E 159

private property relations constitute a shell which no longer fits its contents, a shell which must inevitably decay if its removal is artifi cially delayed, a shell which may remain in a state of decay fo r a fairly long period (if, at the worst, the cure of the opportunist abscess is protracted), but which will inevitably be removed. 13

Following Marx and Lenin, Jameson's utopia aims at transforming the structures or the base of society so that they will become irrec oncilable with the existing superstructure. Therefore Jameson is proposing a transgression. One way to propose such a transgression of the relation between base and superstructure is to find a non-statal fu nctioning of the base. In the preface to first volume of Capital, Marx writes that he does not "by any means depict the capitalist and the landowner in rosy colors. But individuals are dealt with here only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, the bearers of particular class interests." From his standpoint of analysis, the indi vidual cannot be made "responsible fo r relations whose creature he remains ...however much he may subjectively raise himself above them."14 Capitalism thus appears as an anonymous social organiza tion, without a central body fo r regulation. As much as capitalism is an anonymous machine, equally the capitalists and the economic follow and are subjected to relations imposed upon them. In the last part of the volume three of Capital, Marx presents the fo rmula of trinity: "Capital-profit (profit of enterprise plus interest), land ground-rent, labor-wages, this is the trinity fo rmula which comprises all the secrets of the social production process," the mate rial conditions of production. 15 There is an impersonal rule in the functioning of capitalism-or the "religion of everyday life," as

13 V.I. Lenin, "Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism," m Essential Wo rks ofLenin, New York: Dover, 1987, 269. 14 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 92. 15 Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 3, London: Penguin, 1991, 953. 160 AGON HAMZA

Marx calls it. All the structures (political, economic, social, ideologi cal) are grounded at an impersonal level; that is, they are impersonal structures. Instead, we have that which Marx names as "personifica tion of things and the reification of the relations of production."16 The lesson here is that the social fo rms cannot be distinguished from the material content, as expressed in the trinity formula. In this regard, when we make individuals the for the effects of the economy or politics on our own lives, we are already at level 1ero of ideology, which is another name fo r anti-Semitism and other fascist proce dures of reification of social relations in a given social group. Marx writes that the "society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand."17 Here we proceed with an Althusserian lesson: class struggle precedes the classes that struggle, and itis in the class struggle that the classes are constituted. They do not exist at the ontic level as part of objective social reality. Various fo rms of domi nation, exploitation, and oppression characterize contemporary capitalism, but each one always falls short in encompassing them all. This is why Marx was preoccupied with the economic structures of the capitalist fo rm of social organization. However, even a complete understanding of the capitalist base does not mean that capitalism as a mode of production and distribution is completely understood. We do not simply need to understand or recognize classes. In Europe, it is the far-right political parties who constantly refer to the working class. What is at stake in today's critique of capitalism is the rehabilitation of class analysis and the redefinition of class society as such. Today, instead of referring to entrepreneurs, citi zens, employed, civil or other servants, and so on, we need to radi calize the notion and the concept of the proletariat. We shall come back to this later on.

16 Ibid., 969. 17 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations ofthe Critique of Political Economy, London: Penguin, 1993, 265. FROM THE OTHER SCENE TO THE OTHER STATE 161

The transgression of the relations between base and superstruc ture is, among other things, what Jameson is concerned with. In this enterprise, however, we should not count all too much on the "power of the people." The people, as a democratic body, are not a political agent by definition. Dual power, in which the existing base is transformed to the extent that it does not correspond to the superstructure, should not be understood as a state of emergency in which people will be permanently mobilized. In this regard, the direct participation of the people in horizontal, self-organized movements should not be mandatory. People have the right to apathy, but not to laziness, in collective life. Bureaucratic life, fr om making decisions for the collective to implementing them, should be organized by the politicians, who are always-already militants, in a central body called the party. The whole question of bureaucracy as a fo rm of life hinges on representation versus inclusion. The Communist Party fo rm of organization, in a J amesonian militarized fo rm, should not repre sent the people, but rather include everyone in it. This inclusion overcomes the problem of the duality of powers (state versus party) because there is no party-state, but rather a party instead of a state. Furthermore, not only the duality of representation versus inclusion but also of representation versus participation is solved. But what is the real danger of Jameson's proposal of the wither ing away of both politics and the state? As noted, fo r Jameson, the state is the site of politics. He therefore suggests that the society should be based not on a political but on a bureaucratic fo rm of organization. In my understanding this is the most problematic part of his program, precisely because it is a very tenable proposal. Why? First, on a cynical note, the socialist Yugoslavia, with its concept of self-management, was a bureaucratized fo rm of social organization, with clear elements of a market economy: private property was not completely abolished, the workers were not managers but managers were managing the economy, and so on. So the problem of bureaucracy was not the bureaucratic form, but AGON HAMZA rather that it didn't substitute the value fo rm. This is the true prob lem: that the distance between the party and the state, while imple menting the bureaucratic fo rm of life, also keeps it at a distance fr om the value fo rm, which is allowed to silently exist "in between" state and party. In other words, party is thought of as the substitute fo r the nation, fo r local fo rms of internationalism. According to many analysis and critics, the socialist regimes of the twentieth century failed due to, among other reasons, their unificationof the state with the party, or because of their despotic character and economic and social misery. But was that really the case? In Stalin's USSR, all property and institutions belonged to the state. However, there was one exception: the Communist Party, which functioned at a distance fr om the state. Its status was that of obshchestvennaia-a public organization. Nevertheless, the party had its cells in each state institution. Apropos this, Zizek's thesis is that the failure of twentieth-century communism was due to its distance fr om, not its proximity to, power. When he writes about the relation between the state and politics, he writes that

the failure of the Communist State-Party politics is above all and primarily the failure of anti-statist politics, of the endeavor to break out of the constraints of the State, to replace statal fo rms of organi zation with "direct" non-representative fo rms of self-organization ("councils").18

This is a crucial lesson: whatever fo rm of communist organiza tion we are to think, we have to take into account that we need a unified body of state and the party. We shall come back to this in a moment. In his discussion of the reasons fo r the failure of the socialist experiments, Alain Badiou provides a very provocative but insight ful and profound thesis:

18 Zizek, "How to Begin from the Beginning?" 219. FROM THE OTHER SCENE TO THE OT HER STATE 163

The failure should not be attributed either to the despotic character of socialist states or to their economic shortcomings. It is the with ering away of politics which made these constructions untenable fo r their own leaders. All in all, people played practically no part.19

Judging fr om this, we can argue that the withering away of the state, as the ultimate goal of communism, should not be under stood as the end of politics. The risk of both the state and politics withering away is that bureaucratized life will replace politics. Marx defined communism as "the real movement which abol ishes the present state of things." He always toyed with the idea that socialism would be far more advanced and revolutionary than capitalism. Remaining faithful to Marx's definition, we can argue that the present can be abolished only by collective political engagement. Indeed, politics is not the "practical" dimension; before everything, politics is a register of thought. The relation between thinking (i.e., philosophy) and politics is very complex, but let the following proposition suffice: the transformation of thought inevitably produces effectsin politics. The effects of theo retical (philosophical) work have even a greater effectin the world than practical work. It transforms the very fo undations on which the world actually exists and within which politics takes place. Revolutionize the former and the latter will necessarily transform itself. In other words, pure thinking and politics are inseparable. When bureaucracy carries out the functions of politics, social life becomes unbearable: too mechanical and boring. Instead, I propose, in complete agreement with Jameson on the withering away of the state, that we should replace the bureaucratic fo rm of life with the political fo rm of life.

19 Alain Badiou, On the Obscure Disaster-On the End of State-Truth, Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Academie and Arkzin, 2009, 5-6. AGON HAMZA

Communism as a Universal Party Organization

The main danger in dual-power societies is that the structures of dual power might not only pose no threat to state power, but could be tolerated or even (silently) supported by the state. The other risk is that while these structures operate in parallel with state structures, that is to say, as excluded structures, they will be included in the capitalist circulation. The greatest danger, however, is their normalization: a situation in which they present no risk to the ruling ideology. The common danger to these two ways of dual power functioning as inherent transgressions of the law is the normalization of dual power. That was the case with the Zapatistas, the "parallel structures" during the 1990s in Kosovo, anarchists' liberated zones, "temporary autonomous zones," and so on. Let us name these two risks the normalizing risks. For dual power to be successful, it should NOT by all means become acceptable to the state. Otherwise, as someone once said, the zones or territories in which the other power operates risk becoming nice tourist destina tions fo r melancholic leftists. The other side of this is that, as Jameson notes, there are already structures of dual power at work in our world today, from drug dealers to perhaps even the Islamic State-which has the double function of the army and the state, therefore constituting an army state. On this note, let us point to perhaps one of the most difficult aspects of organization: the lack of emblem and organization. We are witnessing continuous upheavals, revolts, and massive demon strations all around the globe. However, we are also witnessing their failure in the "morning after"-that is, the inability to fo rmalize these eruptions into consistent political organizations. Writing on the protests in Brazil, Gabriel Tupinamba argues that

the parallel power exerted by the drug dealers in the slums operates a similar fe at [to fascist appropriation of popular dissatisfaction], proposing a figure of potency to the young men who have already FROM THE OTHER SCENE TO THE OTHER STAT E 165

seen that hard work does not produce any recognition of one 's 20 value and place in Brazilian society.

According to him, it is either fascist groups or drug cartels that offer a place, arms, and organization fo r invisible youth fr om the favelas. The articulation of a brand and belonging is produced by mafia or fascists, which, in the absence of a leftist brand, allows people fr om the lower classes to recognize themselves as actors without depending on the institutional recognition of the state:

Such is, then, the fa ilure-and the challenge-at stake today when trying to combine both direction and confidence in the masses: the difficulty of inventing a political emblem which would cut across the demands fo r identification which distinguish differ ent sectors of the working class while, at the same time, having confidence that such an emblem is capable of evoking passionate discipline and organization in the masses without turning popular 21 power into a totalitarian tendency.

The urgent task of communist thinking is to break the vicious circle of desperate (and failed) attempts to articulate clear posi tions and rethink the fo rms of mass political organization. According to Karatani, capitalism is not merely the existence of production, but the world economy based on fo ur modes of exchange: A) reciprocity of the gift; B) plunder and protection; C) commodity exchange; and D) the mode which transcends the other three. In our capitalist societies, however, mode of exchange C is dominant. The whole point is to overcome the mode of commodity exchange (C): that is, to invent a new mode of exchange that resolves the contradictions of mode C. For Karatani, this means a

20 Gabriel Tupinamba, "What Is a Party a Part Of?" Crisis and Critique 1 (1 ), 2014, 226, crisiscritique.org. 21 Ibid. 166 AGON HAMZA return to mode A: "the mode ofexchange D, as the restoration ofA in a higher dimension, is in fact only possible with the negation of A."22 Karatani is well aware that there is no such thing as eradicat ing commodity exchange. One can eradicate capitalism and capital based ways of life, but not the form of exchange itself. His solution goes as follows: there is no particular way to solve the problems of capital, nation, and state without privileging one of the three. According to Karatani, what he calls the "UN system" can be the "federation of nations as a world system."23 Instead of the world republic proposed by Kant or the United Nations proposed by Karatani, let us call our utopia a non-statal Wo rld Party. Is a univer sal party organization of societies thinkable and conceivable? Departing fr om Zizek's position that the Soviet Union was a dual fo rm of party and state, we will propose a universal party instead of a state. Jameson suggests that the militarized power should be "a kind of network or exoskeleton of the social needs and functions: something somewhere between a universal democracy, a political party, and a bureaucracy in which everyone is his own bureaucrat." Let us proceed with replacing the army with the party. Instead of everyone being his or her own bureaucrat, we shall propose mili tants of the party to replace the bureaucrats. In order fo r the univer sal party to function in running society, it has to have potent mili tants. In doing so, we keep the political invention alive. The universal party should reappropriate the notions of discipline, hier archy, order, collectivity, and so on. Mao used to say that without an ideological discipline, there can be no order in the party. Let us propose the fo llowing thesis: the party is the condition forpolitics. It provides the suprastatalform of politics, which in order to exist

22 Kojin Karatani, Th e Structure of Wo rld History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange, Durham, N C: Duke University Press, 2014, xi-xii. We should note that fo r Karatani, the "return to mode A" is done in a Kantian fo rm. 23 Ibid. FROM THE OTH ER SCENE TO THE OTHER STAT E 167 has to be organized. The question remains: how do we turn the state against itself, to operate and fu nction in a non-statal fo rm? The absolute precondition is creating strong and efficient party structures, a strong body that will transform the entire social and political life. The abolition of capitalism has to go hand in hand with the transformationof the state, which we call a non-statal state or a party. To our previous thesis of politics as thought, we should add another element: politics is thought, acting, and organization. But what are its foundations? The most difficult part is the economic class struggle. The status of the worker has changed: it is double in relation to its position in the processes of production and of consumption. Karatani maintains that "consumers are simply members of the proletariat who have stepped into the site of circu lation," which, in his understanding, makes the consumerist move ment part of the proletarian movement. 24 Therefore, the 1968 slogan "back to the factories" is no longer operative. Perhaps the shift is fr om the struggle in the factories to struggles in the field of consumption. The traditional relation between power structures and exploitation, or production and society, has to be rethought. The emergence of new fo rms of production necessitates new fo rms of exploitation, and with them new fo rms of domination. In this regard, we need to reactualize the notion of the proletariat: the proletariat is not only she or he fr om whom surplus-value is extracted, but who is alienated fr om the substance of our subjectiv ity. In this sense, the Communist Manifesto's call "proletarians of the world, unite" is actual: we need a large-scale unification of workers, consumers, the excluded, immigrants, the unemployed, the unem ployable and illegally employed, dispossessed farmers, youth with no prospects, and so on. Jameson writes that "the new utopia, indeed, must welcome the most outrageous self-indulgences and personal freedoms of its citizens in all things, very much including puritanism and the

24 Ibid., 290. 168 AGON HAMZA hatred of self-indulgence and personal freedoms." A new ethics should be invented. Jameson proposes that the life of the army barracks is such that

the life ofthe recruit or draftee... always involves being thrown together with people utterly unlike you, fr om wholly different and incompatible backgrounds, classes, ethnicities, and even sexes. The instantaneous dislikes and distasteful cultural unfamiliarities, the inescapable elbow rubbing with people with whom you have nothing in common and would normally avoid-this is true democracy, normally concealed by the various class shelters, the professions, or the family itself.

This is the ethics of Agota Kristof--of the double levels of aliena tion and solidarity. Already in our societies we are thrown into collectivities with unknown people; we need a radical form of alienation, a ruthless alienation founded on profound solidarity. Jameson's use of psychoanalysis and Lacan also sheds light into a very complicated matter. His insights are useful in articulatinghow, in communism, we will have fewerexcuses fo r our unhappiness. As such, we are more susceptible to envy and other pathologies, opening up a completely new field of theory concerning communistpathol ogies. The universal party fo rm of social organizations can also be structured in military terms: each nation forms a division. But, as in the army, it is the central command or the Central Committee that runs the divisions, not vice versa, as is the case with NATO or UN. This division of nations into army brigades should not be seen as a fo rm of fe deralism; the party fo rm of social organization is unitary. This fo rm of social organization seems impossible to realize. Maybe it is. But we should always remember that partial emanci pation (national, regional, and so on) is equally impossible. Without a global organized movement, revolution is simply unim aginable. If we fail in creating a strong international movement, the probable outcome is yet another world war-and the current conjuncture is certainly leading us toward that situation. 6

A Japanese Utopia

Kojin Karatani

I read Fredric Jameson's "An American Utopia" just as I was beginning to commit myself to various protest movements against Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's bill to enable Japan to dispatch its Self-Defense Forces overseas in collaboration with the United States. These movements, especially street demonstrations, grad ually gathered popular momentum, reaching a scale the likes of which has not been seen since the 1960s. The people, including young students, are particularly outraged by Abe's trampling on Japan's post-World War II pacifist constitution, in particular Article 9, which reads:

Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people fo rever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of fo rce as means of settling international disputes. In order to accomplish the aim of the preced ing paragraph, land, sea, and air fo rces, as well as other war poten tial, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized. 170 KOJIN KARATANI

This provision prohibits Japan from having any military power. It unconditionally denies the right of waging war. Any state may claim the right to defend itself, but Japan abandons it. Apparently, this provision reflects the antiwar Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, which can be traced back to Kant's "perpetual peace." I will come back to this point later in more detail. The mass media expected this bill to pass based on Prime Minister Abe's high approval rating. However, Abe's proposal was met with an unanticipated setback, as he aroused deep resent ment outside of the Japanese Diet. This unlikely-but growing protest seemed to confirm my long-held theory about Article 9. Here I will outline this theory, making references to Jameson's paper. I had a curious thought while reading "An American Utopia," which goes like this. If my understanding is accurate, Jameson argues that there are no more effective tactics fo r revolution in America than general conscription, and that is an American utopia. I was deeply moved by Jameson's desperate measure, not to mention the rare candidness of his essay. At the same time, I believe that his theory opens up another possibility. Following Jameson, I would like to call it "A Japanese Utopia." In fact, these two utopias are inextricably connected. The first thing to say in relation to Article 9 is that it has not been put into practice. Nevertheless, Japan has maintained it intact to the present day. To be more specific, we have the Self-Defense Forces of Japan, which ranks high on international lists of weap onry and military budgets. On top of this, the United States Forces Japan maintains 132 military bases throughout Japan, which are financiallysupported by Japan. How is such a thing possible under this constitution? It is impossible, of course. In order to cover over this incongruousness, the Japanese government has repeatedly stretched the "interpretation" of Article 9. For example, according to the government, since the Self-Defense Forces renounce the "use of fo rce as a means of settling international disputes," it A JAPANESE UTOPIA cannot possibly be an army, nor a military power. Let me draw your attention to the fact that it is called our "forces" and not our "military." Similarly, its members are called "personnel" or "members," not "soldiers." But no "interpretation" can possibly justify the existence of the Self-Defense Forces in Japan, so long as the Constitution remains in fo rce. Thinking logically, there seem to be two options: abolish the Self-Defense Forces or abolish Article 9. This is normal logic. But Japan has avoided logic. Instead, it has held onto the Constitution it never put into practice while increasingly strength ening the Self-Defense Forces. In order to justify this, Japan continually-and arbitrarily-stretches interpretations of the Constitution to suit its needs. However, Article 9 cannot be read to justify sending the Self Defense Forces into overseas battlefields. Even if such a farfetched interpretation is conceded, it would still require a radical departure from that interpretation in order to actually send the Self-Defense Forces personnel to the battlefield at the risk of their lives. It is quite clear that if Japan really wants to take part in war, it has to amend Article 9 instead of simply changing the interpreta tion. If this is what the people want as well, no one can stop it. In fact, the ruling strata have long wished to amend the Constitution, but the ruling conservative party has never dared to do so. The reason fo r its hesitation is quite simple. It has never made a consti tutional amendment the main issue in an election campaign. In fact, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has announced plans fo r a new Constitution several times, but never brought the issue up during elections. A number of politicians have openly supported the idea, but they hold their tongues during election campaigns. Even Prime Minister Abe has done the same. Why is this? The reason is quite simple. They know that making a constitutional amendment the main issue in an election would lead to a sure catastrophe. 172 KOJIN KARATANI

Hoping to create the impression that war is imminent, Prime Minister Abe has been inflaming tensions with neighboring nations, thereby manipulating public opinion. This has worked well, and most of the mass media seemed to succumb to it. If this is the case, however, why then is Abe still holding back fr om openly suggesting the amendment of Article 9, his long-cherished dream? He seems unlikely ever to do so, because-and again-he knows that he and his party would suffer at the polls. He does not, however, understand why this is so. I assume that he must be optimistically thinking that continually manipulating public opinion to his benefit will eventually earn him the support he needs to launch the amendment process. By the same token, I doubt if the pro-Article 9 camp knows why the people have shown such steadfast support fo r this Article. I think they fear that if current trends continue, eventually people will start supporting the constitutional amendment. The pro-Article 9 camp believe something like this: Article 9 is not carried out literally, but we must be content that it still survives and has some deterrent effect. But I want to insist that we carry out Article 9 or else we abandon it. I will come back to this point later. For now I will just point out that my claim seems to resonate with Jameson's ideas. In the United States the general conscription system was abol ished at the end of the Vietnam War. It is said that it is no longer necessary. This is because today's wars require only professional soldiers and robots such as drones, and the drafted public cannot acquire such skills. However, that is not the actual reason why the conscription system was abolished. The truth is that the govern ment was not able to maintain it. Enforcing the system would arouse huge protest movements like the ones in the 1960s. General conscription is not just a military matter. This is because it came into being along with civil revolution; that is, it came into being with the birth of the nation-state. It is therefore inseparable fr om such "just causes" as liberty and equality. In the times of A JAPANESE UTOPIA 173 absolute monarchy, the mercenary system was employed. In this sense, American wars today hark back to that period. Now that we are in the age of the "absolute monarchy of capital" (neoliberal ism), the United States cannot pretend that there is a cause just enough to reintroduce the general conscription system. Besides, general conscription makes today's high-tech wars impossible. In this sense, Jameson's demand implies renouncing war, not to mention denouncing the absolute monarchy of capital. Let us now consider the Constitution of Japan, which renounces the right to wage war. This was not drawn up nor drafted by the Japanese of their own accord. It was imposed on Japan by the occupation army led by General Douglas MacArthur. The Constitution was meant to eradicate Japanese so-called emperor fascism. In Article 1, the role of emperor, who used to be the sovereign, is prescribed as "the symbol of the unity of the people with whom resides sovereign power." In Article 9, as I have mentioned before, the use of force is entirely renounced. However, at the same time, it is undeniable that the occupation army had some "idealism," held by many leftist New Dealers. They nurtured and supported Japanese labor movements and agrarian reform. On top of that, they prompted Japan to renounce the right to wage war, in the fo rm of Article 9. A utopia that seemed unrealizable in the United States was actually smuggled into the Japanese Constitution. Although the New Dealers were to be purged soon after this, their will remained in Article 9. Thus Article 9, which presupposed the United Nations' found ing in 1945 and was based upon the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 as well as Kantian thought, was introduced into Japan. Of course there were sympathizers of Kantian peace theory among the Japanese who were involved in the process of enacting the Constitution. Yet it was only through the constraint of the occupa tion army that this idea was actualized. It is this fact of the United States's imposition of Article 9 to which the conservative revisionist ideologues repeatedly refer. 174 KOJIN KARATANI

But they turn a blind eye to the fo llowing fact: When the Korean War broke out, the United States, wanting Japan to join the mili tary effort, demanded that Japan revise its Constitution. That means that the United States at that point no longer had any inten tion of fo rcing Article 9 on Japan. Shigeru Yoshida, the prime minister at the time, responded to this demand with a refusal. In this sense, the Constitution was chosen voluntarily by the Japanese. Prime Minister Yo shida was a pro-American conservative, but in order to reject America's demand he went so far as to request that the Socialist Party organize an anti-rearmament movement. Why was it that he tried to protect Article 9? It is said that he gave prior ity to the economic recovery of Japan. But my opinion is different: it was because he judged that proposing revision would lead to the collapse of his party, not to mention his administration. It was not a risk worth taking. Meanwhile, Yoshida did accept the fo rmation of the National Police Reserve (the predecessor of the Self-Defense Forces), which he claimed did not infringe on Article 9. This marked the start of the practice of changing the interpretation of the Constitution in place of changing the Constitution itself. In fact, Japanese soldiers were used in secret in the Korean War. Needless to say, Japan was the US military base during the war. This was the case with the Vietnam War as well. Such was the real ity despite Article 9. Nonetheless, Japanese leaders did not abolish Article 9. They only changed the interpretation. That became the standard method of the LDP thereafter. They never bring up the issue of a constitutional amendment at election time. However, they have also been certain that the time fo r amendment will come at some point, once Japan rises as an economic giant. Today they still believe that they should be able to change it, on the grounds that the Constitution was not established of Japan's own accord. But things did not turn out as they antici pated. Article 9 has been long supported by the Japanese people. Why is this? The LDP believes that the Japanese have been brainwashed by left-wing intellectuals and politicians. But this is a A JAPANESE UTOPIA 175 sheer misunderstanding. The left wing, fo r that matter, used to be rather critical of Article 9. They considered fo rming a people's self-defense force in order to expel the United States Forces Japan. It was only much later that the left wing turned pro-Article 9. Nevertheless, the conservatives blame the left-wing campaign fo r the Japanese people's longstanding and steadfast support of Article 9. They cannot make sense of it otherwise. With regard to this, what are the thoughts of the pro-Constitution camp? They seem just as unable to understand the reason for the people's support of the Constitution. They think the Japanese supported Article 9 because they experienced the cruelty of war and repented over the damage Japan caused to its neighboring nations. They also believe that Article 9 was maintained thanks to their own efforts to enlighten people. But I do not think they have the right picture. The Japanese did not fo rm the Constitution through conscious reflection, as they claim. The fact is that it was imposed by the occupation army. But it is also a fact that the people came to support it. Nevertheless, this did not happen through the intellectuals' enlightenment efforts. If that was the only reason, its popular support could not have lasted so long. And if the people's rejection of war is based upon their own experience of war, their support of the Constitution should have withered as that memory faded with time and with the chang ing of generations. But that has not been the case with Article 9. It still enjoys strong support in spite of the weakening of the left wing intellectuals. Pro-Article 9 activists think that they are protecting the Article. We may say, however, that they do not protect Article 9 but are protected by it. How, then, can we explain this situation, in which the Japanese people were compelled to accept Article 9 by the occupation army but have supported it voluntarily and cherished it, despite contin ual criticism and manipulation of public opinion? Here I must refer to Freud, specificallyfo llowing Wo rld War I. Freud supported Austria's participation in Wo rld War I. As the KOJIN KARATANI war lingered, however, he became negative toward it, but still wrote the fo llowing comment:

It [war] strips us of the later accretions of civilization, and lays bare the primal man in each of us. It completes us once more to be heroes who cannot believe in their own death; it stamps strangers as enemies, whose death is to be brought about or desired; it tells us to disregard the death of those we love. But war cannot be abolished; so long as the conditions of existence among nations are so different and their mutual repulsion so violent, there are bound to be wars.1

In his view, the human cruelty seen in war is only an exposure of our ordinarily repressed "life of feeling," unleashed by the state. So he concludes that we may hope fo r this to disappear after the war. This way of thinking is characteristic of Freud's early writ ings. At this stage, he was still basing his thought upon the dualism between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. The pleas ure principle seeks to actualize the unconscious desire or drive. But since that could put the ego in danger, it needs to be curbed. That is the role of the reality principle, which originates in one 's father or in society. Under normal circumstances, the pleasure principle is held in check by the reality principle, but is unleashed under special circumstances, such as in dreams, rituals, and wars. After the war, however, Freud had to revise his view when he met patients suffering from war neurosis. For them, the war was far from gradually fading away fr om their memories. The night mare of the war awoke them every night. Freud noticed something here that could not be explained within the fr amework of dualism. He wrote: "Enough is left unexplained to justify the hypothesis of a compulsion to repeat-something that seems more primitive,

Sigmund Freud, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," in Th e Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Wo rks of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 14, trans. ]. Strachey, London: Hogarth Press, 1986, 299. A JAPANESE UTOPIA 177 more elementary, more instinctual than the pleasure principle which it over-rides."2 Here Freud introduced a new concept, "the death drive," which causes repetition compulsion. With regard to this, he stressed the positive aspects of the death drive; the role it plays is actually more positive than negative. The repetition compulsion in war neurosis is not just a symptom caused by the aftershock of the war, but an attempt to overcome that shock by repeating it. This led to the notion of the "superego," which Freud posited in The Ego and the Id in 1923. He had discussed similar notions earlier in his career, fo r example the idea of the "censor" in dreams that he mentions in In terpretation of Dreams ( 1900). The censor is explained as the social norms internalized through one 's parents. That is a fo rm of the reality principle. But the superego he presents in his The Ego and the Id is differentfr om this. Whereas the censor comes fr om outside, the superego comes fr om inside-or, in other words, fr om the death drive. To put it differently, while the censor is heteronymous, the superego is autonomous or self-regulating. By introducing the death drive, Freud locates the basis fo r human autonomy, which at times exceeds internalized social norms or the reality principle. What is more, he holds that the superego exists in the collective as well. This theoretical turn is more evident in his cultural theory than in his psychoanalysis in the narrow sense, because culture concerns the superego of the collective. I said that it was not during but after the war when Freud encountered patients of war neurosis (repetition compulsion) and came to think about questions such as the death drive, the aggres sion drive, and the superego. In this light, I think that we can regard Article 9 as the superego in the unconscious of the Japanese people. Article 9 is not a matter of consciousness. Freud noted that

2 Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Wo rks of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 18, trans. J. Strachey, London: Hogarth Press, 1986, 23. KOJIN KARATANI although the patients of obsessive neurosis are tormented by a guilty conscience, they themselves are not aware of this. He called it an "unconscious sense of guilt."3 Such is the case with the Japanese people 's relation to Article 9. It is a kind of obsessive neurosis, demonstrating an unconscious sense of guilt. Support fo r Article 9 does not originate in conscious ness. Therefore, Article 9 does not originate in people 's sense of guilt. Nor is it maintained through deepening reflection on their past. If such was the case, it would have been abolished long ago. Article 9 involves a strong ethical moment, but it is not conscious or voluntary. For that matter, Freud remarked on masochism as follows:

The situation is usually presented as though ethical requirements were the primary thing and the renunciation of instinct fo llowed fr om them. This leaves the origin of the ethical sense unexplained. Actually, it seems to be the other way about. The first instinctual renunciation is enforced by external powers, and it is only this that creates the ethical sense, which expresses itself in conscience and demands a fu rther renunciation of instinct.4

Freud's view brilliantly explains the fact that Article 9 was "enforced by the external powers," that is, by the occupation army, but took root deeply in the collective unconsciousness of the Japanese people. To put it differently, in the beginning was the "renunciation" of aggression enforced by the external powers, which, however, "created the ethical sense" or conscience that "demands fu rther renunciation" of war. Let me say this once

3 Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Wo rks of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 19, trans. J. Strachey, London: Hogarth Press, 1986, 166. 4 Sigmund Freud, "The Economic Problem of Masochism," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Wo rks of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 19, trans. J. Strachey, London: Hogarth Press, 1986, 170. A JAPANESE UTOPIA 179 again. Article 9 was not made by the people 's voluntary agree ment, but enforced by the external powers. Yet it took root deeply all the more fo r it. Currently, and perhaps from this time on, the conservative administration wants to urge the Japanese to participate in war under various pretexts. They might temporarily succeed in this, but it would sooner or later provoke tremendous resentment, which would then press them into carrying out the Constitution more literally. The Japanese would then be bound to Article 9 for good. This is why I am optimistic as well as pessimistic regarding the future of Japan. I attach importance to Article 9 because it is grounded in the Kantian idea, about which I want to make two points. First, regard ing the common critique that it is idealistic: When Kant proposed a federation of nations, Hegel criticized it as idealistic. He argued that in order fo r the federation to function effectively, there would need to be a superpower with the ability to punish other states fo r violation of rules. Therefore, peace is unlikely without a hegem onic power. This argument is employed even now to criticize the United Nations. In fact, the Kantian idea was totally ignored throughout the nineteenth century, but was revived toward the end of the century as the imperialist wars took place and bore fruit as the League of Nations fo llowing World War I, as well as the Kellogg-Briand Pact. This later led to the fo rmation of the United Nations in 1945. It is self-evident that the Kantian idea was behind all of these events. As a matter of fact, Article 9 presupposed the existence of the United Nations, as is stated in the preamble of the Constitution. In this regard, the Kantian idea did not remain a mere idealism. It was actualized to a considerable degree. Why? Earlier I mentioned that Hegel criticized the Kantian idea of peace as ideal ist and unrealistic. Such critiques have been repeated to the present day. However, Kant was far fr om a naive idealist. Concerning human nature, Kant shared the same negative view as Hobbes; 180 KOJ IN KARATA N I

Kant thought humans have an intrinsically "unsocial sociability" (ungesellige Geselligkeit) and that this cannot be removed. This "unsocial sociability" can be seen as synonymous with what Freud called the "aggression drive." Consequently, Kant never thought the federation of fr ee nations would be realized through human reason or morality. To the contrary, it would be this "unsocial sociability, " or war, that would eventually realize it. Such a view can be called "the cunning of nature," in contrast to what Hegel called "the cunning of reason." Secondly, I want to argue that Kantian perpetual peace means not a mere question of peace, but revolution. Kant published "Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch" in 1795, just before the outbreak of a world war that later came to be called the N apoleonic Wars. He put fo rward the idea of a world fe deration of nations in this essay not simply because a war was looming. He had written a thesis to the same effectin 1784, but fo r a differentpurpose. At that time he was in support of the Rousseauian civil revolution, although Kant was skeptical about this in one respect: Rousseau, Kant argued, thought of revolution only within a single state. However, if a civil revolution took place in one nation, it would be immediately interfered with and crushed by the neighboring old regimes (absolute monarchical states). To prevent this, Kant thought, a federation of free states would be necessary. In fact, a civil revolution did take place in France in 1789. Neighboring states like Austria meddled with the revolution in order to overthrow it. France then started a defensive war, from which Napoleon emerged as a military leader. It was around this time that Kant published his essay on perpetual peace. It drew attention only in terms of the question of war, and it was fo rgotten that this was originally related to the question of civil revolution. Things took a similar course in the years that followed, but civil revolution and the fe deration of nations always remained decou pled. For instance, two world-historical incidents took place after World War I: the Russian Revolution and the fo rmation of the A JAPANESE UTOPIA

League of Nations. It is believed that the fo rmer was based upon Marx's thought and the latter upon Kant's thought, but the two are inseparable from a Kantian as well as a Marxian viewpoint. Marx thought of abolishing the state, but realized that it would be impos sible within a single state, because the state exists vis-a-vis other states. Thus, he concludes, "communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples all at once and simultaneously. "5 Similarly, when Kant emphasized perpetual peace as distinct fr om temporary peace, the implication was the necessity of a civil revolution in each state as a prerequisite. In this sense, it may be said that Kant too thought of the simultaneous civil revolution of all nations. In this way Kantian and Marxian thought are interconnected. Nevertheless, they were considered irrelevant to each other, and this led to the failure of these world-historical events. The Russian Revolution took place within a single state and was immediately met with interference and invasions by the surrounding powers. This warped the nature of the socialist revolution. That is to say, faced with crisis, the revolutionaries, who intended to sublate the state, had no choice but to first strengthen the state in order to resist this intervention. Meanwhile, the League of Nations failed to function. It was in practical terms nothing more than an alliance of the imperialist states, and on top of that the superpower, the United States, refused to take part. As a result, the League of Nations in its actually existing fo rm remained far from a realiza tion of the Kantian idea. The powerlessness of the League of Nations was revealed in its inability to prevent Wo rld War II. The United Nations, which was established to take the League 's place after that war, was far more effi cient in comparison, but still not powerful enough to curb the hegem onic powers. It has grown even more powerless in recent years.

5 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, "The German Ideology," in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Collected Wo rks, Vol. 5, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 197 6, 49. KOJIN KARATANI

In retrospect, it turns out that the socialist revolutions of the twentieth century were doomed because the two moments, civil revolution in each nation and a fe deration of nations, were decou pled. Now we have a good picture of what our possible revolution ary movements should look like. They must be based upon countermovements against capital-state in each nation and upon the solidarity and association among them. But the latter is no mean feat, as it is likely to be divided and crushed by capital-states, just as the Second International was dissolved by the First World War. The Third International was solid, but in that case one nation dominated the others. Now only one possibility seems to remain: coupling Kant and Marx, so to speak. On the one hand we carry out countermove ments against capital-state in each nation, while on the other hand prompting the UN to change into an organ where these move ments can be united. Were these things realized, what seemed impossible would become possible, whether that would be Article 9 or the general conscription system. I think that is a simultaneous world revolution. 7

Jameson and Method: On Comic Utopianism

Frank Ruda

It has become common prejudice to claim that utopia ...is not possible. It fo llows that the spell under which most people live is not the spell of the materialism that is said to be so awful. The real spell . . . is that of a vulgar idealism that has long since fo rgotten its own assumptions. -Theodor W. Adorno1

We firstof all have to engage in a cultural revolution. -Alain Badiou2

That's impossible! From history to politics

What kind of text is one effectivelyreading when one reads Fredric Jameson's "An American Utopia"? What kind of method, what

Theodor W. Adorno, History and Freedom: Lectures 1964- 1965, Cambridge: Polity, 2006, 68. 2 Alain Badiou, "True and False Contradictions of the Crisis," Liheration, trans. David Broder, May 29, 2015, http://www .versobooks.com/ blogs/ 20 14-alain-badiou -true-and-false-contradictions-of-the-crisis. FRANK RUDA kind of methodology is here employed? Jameson's title seems to suggest that such questions are not really worthy of being raised at all. Isn't one here clearly confronted with a utopia? So, why bother? One should nonetheless not hasten to give too swift an answer, since Jameson himself, close to the very beginning of his text, states that he "can't be sure whether I am proposing a politi cal program or a utopian vision" and then adds that "neither of which, according to me, ought to be possible any longer. "3 The text itself therefore presents a proposal of which it is unclear if it is a utopia or a political program, yet what is clear is that it does something that is not or at least ought not to be possible any longer. One might then infer that the difficultyof how to classify the very status of Jameson's proposal, the difficulty of classifying it as a program or a utopia, is internally linked to, if not derived from, the very impossibility that characterizes his proposal. To clarify the very status of the text itself, if distinctly determinable or not, an exercise in fo rmal analysis is needed. It will investigate the specific locus fr om which Jameson's proposal is enunciated. This is not an external starting point, but-dealing with an author so preoccu pied with the analysis of fo rm-this will rather directly lead into the heart of the matter.4 Before entering directly into the argu ment of the text, I will thus demonstrate that it is instructive to first specify the text's peculiarly impossible status-and in this precise sense I will begin by examining Jameson's methodological starting point. One can do so by differentiating between six different aspects that are at the same time conceptually interwoven. The first reason why Jameson's text has an impossible status is historical, since the proposal it presents is not impossible as such, but rather impossible in the specific time in which it is articulated:

3 Fredric Jameson, "An American Utopia." 4 Here one just has to recall his classic: Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Th eories of Literature, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974. JAMESON AND METHOD: ON COMIC UTOPIANISM 185 that is, it is only impossible relative to its own historical situation. This is why the impossibility of Jameson's proposal is first and fo remost not ontological but rather historical, insofar as it is produced within a particular situation and thus mediated by the historical circumstances in which it appears. Therefrom, one can infer that Jameson's proposal secondly appears to be ep istemologically impossible. For if impossibility is not a neutral modality but one that is produced in a historically specific setting and its modal functioning therefore has to be historicized (as in point 1 ), then such an (historically specific) impossibility is generated by means of presenting some things, some thoughts, as being unthinkable. In short, this is to say that there is always a historically specific rendering of what "here and now" can possibly be imagined and thought. Here it is thirdly important to note that the historically specific determination of what is ep istemologicallyconsidered to be impos sible ultimately has ontological eff ects. This is because that which is determined as impossibility within and by the historical situation does necessarily not appear as simply being an impossibility rela tive to the present state of things.5 Rather, it cannot but appear-at least fr om within (the perspective of) the situation-as being impossible as such, impossible in itself.6 The historical production of impossibility thereby necessarily ontologizes (and naturalizes) its own modal product. It therefore seems as if what appears

5 A (maybe) more or less complex example fo r this dynamic: The histor ically specificclaim that communism historically failed and that it is therefore impossible to realize any such fo rm of organization, although it declares itself to be a historical claim (one learned this lesson from history), nonetheless draws nonhistorical consequences fr om this, namely that communism was flawed and conceptually (or substantially) doomed to fail fr om the very beginning and is therefore an impossibility as such. 6 I will subsequently return to the question if there is or can(not) be another perspective than the perspective of the situation and will ultimately argue that there is one, but it is a peculiarly impossible one. 186 FRANK RUDA impossible now will have been impossible since fo rever. 7 This is why Jameson's proposal does not only appear historically specific (1) or epistemologically impossible (2); rather, it is also linked with its ontological effects (3). In short, and paradoxically put, Jameson's place of enunciation therefore itself appears ontologi cally impossible, something like a historical, epistemological, ontological, modal "no-man's land."8 But how is it possible since it is impossible-to tackle such a peculiar concatenation? To answer this, one has to introduce another aspect. It is fourthlycrucial to note that the concoction of the first three determining aspects of impossibility has practical as well aspol itical consequences. The (determining) move fr om historical specificity to epistemology to ontology thus leads back to the very historical situation where it originated. That is to say: if something is rendered within a certain historical situation as being impossible to conceive of, this ultimately turns this very "something" into an ontological impossibility, and this also determines patterns of possible and impossible actions.9 Jameson's text is literally-in the double sense of the term-doing something impossible. But how

7 It therefore follows the logic nicely captured by Jean-Pierre Dupuy, who once noted: "An object possesses a property x"-for example to be possible or thinkable-"until time t; after t, it is not only that the object no longer has the property x; it is that it is not true that it possessed x at any time. The truth-value of the proposition 'the object 0 has the property x at the moment t' therefore depends on the moment in which the proposition is enunciated." The same holds for the proposition "the object 0 is thinkable I unthinkable." Jean-Pierre Dupuy, "Quand je mourrai, rien de notre amour n'aura jamais existe," unpublished typescript, cited in: Slavoj Zizek, Absolute Recoil: To wards a Ne w Foundation of Dialectical Materialism, London: Verso, 2014, 187). 8 To my mind, this is why Jameson can justifiably call this no-man's-land "also that of dual power." 9 The sense in which I here characterize the differentaspects of impossi bility is very close to what Alain Badiou calls "the state (of a situation)." For this, see Alain Badiou, Being and Event, London: Continuum, 2005, 81-1 12. JAMESON AND METHOD: ON COMIC UTOPIANISM 187 do these patterns appear? This is where the fifth aspect of impos sibility enters the scene. The fif th aspect has to do with what Jameson in a different context once referred to as the "widespread paralysis of the collec tive or social imaginary. " w Why is there a link between impossibil ity and the paralysis of the collective imaginary? One way to answer this would be to refer to Althusser's famous definition of ideology as imaginary relation to the real conditions of exist ence-which would then mean that it is precisely the imaginary relation within which the first four aspects would be inscribed, as something that Jameson once called "the axiomatics of ideology. " 11 Another, more precise way of answering this question is to take up a diagnosis fr om the beginning of "An American Utopia": that if one today seeks to think radical political change, one immediately seems to face conceptual impasses. There seems to be no alterna tive to the influential and history-making distinction between the "political program" of the left, revolution (or communism), and its alternative "political strategy," reformism (or socialism). Yet, in the present historical setting, this distinction is saturated. Neither of its sides presents any imaginable and/ or mobilizing political option any longer. 12 The idea of revolution became essentially unbelievable (who is going to make it? with what to replace the

10 Fredric Jameson, "Totality as Conspiracy," in The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Sp ace in the Wo rld Sy stem, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995, 9. 11 Fredric Jameson, The Political Un conscious: Na rrative as a Socially Sy mholic Act, New York: Routledge, 1983, 171. It is here important to remark that Jameson leaves out the dimension of the symbolic-that is, fo r him, representation-a dimension to which I will return below. 12 One could, and I think should, supplement this diagnosis of satura tion on the side of the "left" with a saturation on the other side, of the right, which opts fo r returning to a-generically fascist-variety of substantialisms (of race, religions, etc.) to counter the present situation and its self-proclaimed nonideological pragmatist-"realism" of what one can and cannot do. 188 FRANK RUDA current system? etc.); reformism fr om the very beginning proved to be corrupted by the very system it allegedly sought to reform. 13 If this is true and "Gramsci's celebrated alternatives-the war of maneuver and the war of position-no longer seem theoreti cally adequate to the present situation," one today seems to be stuck with old fashion. Not only with an old-fashioned language of revolution that no one believes any longer (and with old fashioned corruption on the other side), but also with an old fashioned distinction between two unfeasible political (non) options. One may here see in what precise sense a historically specific setting generates the very epistemological impossibility that is ontologized and thereby determines practical and political behavior by making certain things unimaginable: if one is stuck with a distinction in which both sides of the distinction do not work, the only way out is to denounce both options ("No, thanks, both are worse"). Although this rejection indicates an option that was not present before, such a maneuver also comes with the danger of ending just as an abstract rejection (although one, even then, is better offthan before). But it should be clear that being stuck with a conceptual instrument that hinders imagining radical change is precisely what paralyzes the collective imaginary. The paralysis is thus a symptom of a situation in which there seems to be no way out, no exit option with regard to the current state of things. This is how late capitalism, in Jameson's term, swallows and absorbs time-the future can be no real future if one cannot imagine any difference to the present state of affairs any longer. "This is the sense in which the very advances in our own system, late capitalism, interpose themselves between ourselves

13 This account of the limitations of the revolution/ reformism distinc tion is consistent with the claim that the impossibilities one is here dealing with are (1) a historically specific, (2) make certain things unthinkable and therefore also (3) appear to be ontologically impossible. This generates ( 4) practical effects that areeff ectuated by determining (5) the imaginary. JAMESON AND METHOD: ON COMIC UTOPIANISM 189 and the fu ture"-a fu ture that thereby becomes a repetition of the past and thereby time as such is lost.14 This assumption "of an end of history ...merely testifies to our cognitive limitations when it comes to the thinking of utopia itself." This is to say that one's imaginary powers are paralyzed when one is in a situation in which what is a historically specific impossibility is conceived of being ontologically impossible and there is practically nowhere to go to. If there is no time left, all politics becomes a politics of space: "all politics is about real estate," about grabbing, keeping, and administering territory. (Globalization is currently the most influ ential name of such real-estate politics.) Any countertendency ultimately turns out to be "politics of the instant" that does not last and conceptually abandons conceptions of permanent organiza tion and sustainability-its paradigm is the slightly anarchic flash mob (and theoretically it is best captured by what Antonio Negri defined as "constituent power"). 15 So one stays and is stuck, as one cannot imagine where to go or even that there is an elsewhere any longer. The fifth reason shows that Jameson's proposal is impossi ble in an imaginarysense. But how is it then at all possible to fo rmu late an impossible proposal?

Cynicism as Anti-Utopianism

This is where the sixth aspect of the impossibility comes in, which is related to why it is unclear if Jameson's proposal is a utopia or a political program. Where does this impossibility to discriminate come fr om? If Jameson's proposal were a clear political program fo r realizing political transformation, it would necessarily be a

14 Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time, New Yo rk: Columbia University Press, 1994, 75f. 15 Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Po wer and the Modern State, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. FRANK RUDA political program for revolution-and since this is not possible, it is not possible. This is a kind of Petitio Principi: a political program for radical change articulated in a time where such a program is unimaginable, because ontologically impossible, must therefore itself be impossible. Therefore, Jameson's proposal can only be utopian in the strictest sense of the term. Since the very function ing of utopia is to imagine what one cannot possibly imagine by means of its form, a fo rm "which insists that its radical difference is the answer to the ideological conviction that no alternative is possible, that there is no alternative to the system." 16 But if this is the case, why is it then unclear, even to Jameson himself, if he proposes a utopia or a political program? Because the very render ing of present-day impossibilities makes even utopias seem impos sible. Utopias were never "mere fictions," but always presented something as possible that broadened the historically specific constructions of ontological possibility and impossibility. Yet these very constructions today seem to prevent utopia-production ontologically. Why? One can answer this by referring, inter alia, to today's "generalized cynicism . . . in which everyone is a Marxist and understands the dynamics and the depredations of capitalism with out feeling it possible to do anything about it."17 Utopias become unimaginable when one cannot imagine that there is anything left to imagine. In short, when knowledge-this is why one is here dealing with cynicism-obstructs the very fu nctioning of the

16 Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, London: Verso, 2005, 232 . 17 Jameson, "An American Utopia." A similar claim-that everyone has become Marxist today-can already be found in the opening pages of Lenin's State and Revolution. I analyze this in greater detail in Frank Ruda, "Was ist ein Marxist? Lenins Wiederherstellung der Wahrheit des N amens," in Namen. Benennung, Verehrung, Wirlcung (1850--1930),ed. Tatjana Petzer, Sylvia Sasse, Franziska Thun-Hohenstein, and Sandro Zanetti, Berlin: Kadmos, 2009, 225-42. JAMESON AN D METH OD: ON COM IC UTOPIANISM 191 imaginary.18 For precisely the fo rm in which knowledge is presented or, in short, the fo rm of knowledge itself, can be the reason why this knowledge does not become effective. Generalized cynicism abolishes (the real kernel of) the imaginary by imaginar ily presenting society as being absolutely transparent-as if all structures were naked. Cynic subjectivity assumes that it is possible to clearly see how the capitalist "world" functions, and it is this very clarity, this very transparency, which obscures, darkens, and obfuscates one's vision. In cynicism, transparency fu nctions as new means of obscuration and obfuscation; that is to say: the very nakedness of capitalist dynamics fu nctions as its newest disguise, which ulti mately paralyzes the imaginary in such a manner that even the production of utopia seems impossible.19 The paralyzing effect thus does not only spring fr om being stuck with a politically inef fective distinction that survived its own time; it also derives fr om this peculiar feature of late capitalist subjectivity. Since the alleg edly non-naive attitude, the "enlightened false consciousness" that is, the cynic-assumes that he clearly sees through the func tioning of capitalism, yet what he ultimately assumes to see is that one cannot change how and that capitalism works.2° Cynicism therefore is a product of the alleged complete transparency of the functioning of capitalist dynamics (everyone knows that there are self-seeking interests behind everything, etc.), because what one

18 Think of the omnipresence of the "scandal" in contemporary societ ies. It is everywhere-although its preferred domain remains, tellingly, the competitive domain of sports. On the fu nction of the scandal, see Alain Badiou, A Ia recherche du riel perdu, Paris: Fayard, 2015. 19 This thesis was developed in Alenka ZupanCiC's magnificent reading of Jean Genet's Th e Balcony: "Power in the Closet (And Its Coming Out)," podcast recording, Backdoor Broadcasting, May 21, 2015, hackdoorhroad casting.net. 20 That "knows falsehood very well ...hut still ...doe s not renounce it." Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso, 2008, 26. FRANK RUDA assumes to see if one sees through this dynamics is that there is nothing left to imagine, no alternative to what is, no fo rm of radi cal change. Because what one sees if one sees through its dynamics is that late capitalism is far too complex to be changed or even properly comprehended. One therefore only comprehends that one cannot comprehend it, as not even trained financeexperts can (and admit it). The cynic is therefore led to assert the precise oppo site of what he wanted to assert, namely that he sees through everything but ultimately he sees nothing, nothing to see, every where. He comprehends everything, but this in the last instance amounts to comprehending that one cannot comprehend what one sees through. It is like a twist on Hegel's famous saying that evil lies in the gaze that perceives evil everywhere: nothing (to imag ine) lies in the gaze that believes to see through everything. This is why when the imaginary is paralyzed, one in a certain sense has lost one's vision. This is why the cynic's subjectivity sees that it does not see any option to imagine a change of the system, simply because it assumes that one cannot see the system as a system. This leads to the assumption that there is no such thing as a totality of capital ism any longer, no system-for systems are those entities in which there is an ordered structure of how things, processes, and the like are related and are therefore comprehensible. Yet, if one comprehends that there is nothing to comprehend, that there is no system, this ultimately leads to the paradoxical account that there is no capitalism any longer, just disparate local phenomena. Say one assumes that the social and political situation of Congo has nothing to do with the political agendas of Western states. If one assumes to see through the dynamics of capitalism, to see capitalism with its pants down, so to speak, and at the same time that there is no comprehensible system fo r this very dynamic, one believes to see through capitalism's dynamics but at the same time assumes that there is no capitalism, since this very term makes no sense-as the "ism" indicates-if it is not a term JAMESON AND METH OD: ON COM IC UTOPIANISM 193 related to the idea of a systematic and hence comprehensible totality. 21 That the absence of systematicity and also comprehensibility follows from the alleged transparency of the dynamics of capitalism is the reason fo r transparency being directly linked to the ideology of complexity-the world is so complex that it is not comprehensi ble. (This results in reducing one 's own experience to the locality "bodily sensation and experience," as Jameson says, a fact already observed by the early Marx. )22 This ideology is also the reason why the majority of the people "believe that the fr ee market actually exists"-yet they are so fr ee that, in full animist spirit, one assumes that they can be satisfied or dissatisfied with certain political deci sions or things happening in the world. That markets are free does then also mean that they are so free that they make their own deci sions and laws independent human agents and in a manner that does not obey any systematic logic.23 One may also render this in utopian terms: fo r the cynic there is no need fo r utopia anymore, simply because what she assumes to see in the world is always already a

21 This is another way of rendering Jameson's claim that late capitalism is a system which makes the idea of totality-an effect reinforced by post modernity and its theory in Jameson's diagnosis-and thereby itself unthink able and unimaginable (as a globalized system). For one rendering of this, see Fredric Jameson, "Cognitive Mapping," in Marxism and the In terpretation of Culture, ed. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg, Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1990, 347-60. 22 A charming and polemical criticism of this ideology can be found in Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Fo undation of Un iversalism, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003, 9ff. For Marx, see Frank Ruda, "Who Thinks Reductively? Capitalism's Animals," Crisis and Critique, Vol. 3, Issue 2, fo rthcoming. 23 A good example fo r such a position within the field of theory is Elie Ayache, The Blank Swan: The End of Probability, Sussex: Wiley, 2010. See also my critique of Ayache in Frank Ruda, "The Speculative Family, or: Critique of the Critical Critique of Critique," in Filo1_ojSki Vestnik, Vol. XXXIII, No. 2, 2012, 53-76. 194 FRANK RUDA utopia. And who needs utopia if one is already living in one? The disappearance of the category of totality is therefore a-representa tional-part of the belief that there is nothing (left) to be changed. For if capitalism disappears in and by means of its own transparency one is left with nothing to change. The cynic subject, the type of subjectivity generated by late capitalism/4 thus assumes to (literally) see through capitalism and what it ultimately sees is the unchangea ble impossibility to change it. What is the effect this has on the production of utopias-if fo r this reason political programs necessarily will not seem viable any longer? Either producing utopias becomes a nai"ve, empty, non enlightened, and futile exercise, and this is even the best-case scenario, or worse, it proves to be dangerous, since today "it has become fashionable to detect the seeds of the totalitarian within the utopian itself and to transform the hoary fo lk wisdom of the adage "the perfect is the enemy of the good" into an anti-utopian political position fo r which the politics of radical change ...must inevitably lead to violence, as 'human nature ' is brutally pressed into an unnatural mold and fo rced to take on utopian and superhu man dimensions."25 Why should producing utopias be dangerous? Simply because if one sees through the dynamics of capitalism one also sees that the unchangeable nature of human beings makes them into self-seeking egotists, always only out fo r their own inter est, in short: one sees that great egalitarian ideas sound nice at first but are ultimately proto-totalitarian because the human is a capi talist animal. 26 This is one of the reasons why today there is a

24 One can see how the five aspects of impossibility are here linked back to the first one: namely there is a historically specific type of subjectivity rela tive to the concatenation of the dimensions of impossibility. 25 Jameson, "An American Utopia." 26 This is obviously naturalizing capitalism and anchoring it in human nature. This can already be fo und in Adam Smith, who contended that in difference to animals humans are exchanging animals. One has never seen any dog exchange two tiny bones fo r a large one, but humans do such things. JAMESON AN D METH OD: ON COM IC UTOPIANISM 195

"diminution in the production of new utopias" and produces the widespread doxa that "not only ... the new is impossible, but also ...utopia is just as unimaginable, its images always reflecting a kind of anthropomorphic projection which we may now limit by recognizing them as projections of our own society and its paro chial obsessions. "27 Utopia production becomes as impossible as any emancipatory political program is today. Cynicism is anti-utopianism. This is because utopias are either fu tile or dangerous, or, and this is the worst-case scenario, because they are nothing but reflections of the very situation-be it historical or more generally the human capitalist condition-they pretend to escape. Late capitalism thereby determines how we dream of a world beyond and after capitalism: in short, how we relate to the fu ture in a strong sense of the term. 28 From such a perspective, communism is the ulti mate (potentially totalitarian, inhuman, and violent) capitalist fantasy that we need to abandon. Here we can see the first-nega tive-reason fo r why it is fundamentally unclear if we are read ing a political program or a utopia: both are equally impossible and unimaginable. Reading Jameson's text therefore means to read what cannot but take the fo rm of an impossible political program and an impossible utopia.

Hence, exchange is in our nature-this is precisely one way of how to under stand that a historically specific claim is ontologized, namely via naturaliza tion. See Adam Smith, Th e We alth of Na tions, New Yo rk: Bantam Bell, 2003, 22-26. 27 Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: Th e Desire Ca lled Utopia and Other Science Fictions, London: Verso, 2005, 128. 28 An instructive elaboration of some categories, concepts, and theoret ical assumptions that were produced by capitalism, yet function as if they have determined human history fo rever, can be found in Slavoj Zizek, Living in the End Times, London: Verso, 2011, 181-243. FRANK RUDA

Preliminary Talk: First as (Impossible} Utopia, Then as (Possible} Political Program

In a situation in which political program as well as utopia seems impossible, Jameson situates his own position of enunciation precisely in this impossibility. It is an impossible position of enuncia tion. But what kind of impossibility is at work here-how to fu rther determine the sixth aspect? To answer this question it is here instructive to recall a comment by Alain Badiou apropos the psychoanalytic definition of the cure:

Lacan said that the object of the cure is "to raise impotence to impossibility. " If we are suffering fr om a syndrome whose worst symptom is acknowledged impotence, then we can raise this impo tence to impossibility. But what does this actually mean? A number of things. It means finding a real point to hold on to, whatever the cost. It means no longer being in the vague net of impotence, histor ical nostalgia and the depressive component, but rather finding, constructing and holding on to a real point, which we know we are going to hold on to, precisely because it is a point uninscribable in the law of the situation ...declared by the prevailing opinion to be both ... absolutely deplorable and completely impracticable, but which you yourselves declare that you are going to hold on to, whatever the cost. 29

Fredric Jameson makes this very methodological and fo rmal move. He raises this impotence, the impotence of seeing noth ing but the impotence of the system. This generates an impos sible vision. This is again not an external take on Jameson's method, applying the idea of psychoanalytic cure onto it. Rather, Jameson himself argues that he proposes "the radical therapy fo r dystopia, its radical treatment," by means of which

29 Alain Badiou, Th e Meaning of Sarkoty, London: Verso, 2008, 34f. JAMESON AN D METH OD: ON COM IC UTOPIANISM 197

"we hammer away at anti-utopianism not with arguments, but with therapy"-a therapy in the very precise sense of the Lacanian cure mentioned, which Jameson also links to what he calls "cultural revolution."30 The therapy of the present impotence, whose symptom is the paralysis of the collective imaginary, is to fo rmulate an impossible proposal that can only appear deplorable and impracticable. But obviously there is more to it. This very proposal unfolds by traversing the complex course of impossibilities (from one to five) that generate the contemporary impotence to imagine radical change. It thereby produces a point of impossibility-an impos sibility of a wholly different nature than the impossibilities discussed before. How to find it? First, this course tackles the historical dimension of impossibility by countering a kind of historical fo rgetting, and by referring to another option fo r how to imagine the transition out of capitalism that exceeds the classical model of revolution and reform: the "less often acknowledged, let alone discussed," seemingly fo rgotten option of dual power. With this emphasis, Jameson creates, secondly, a new fo rm of thinkabil ity that tackles not only the epistemological aspect of impossibil ity, but also, thirdly, its ontological repercussions. It brings about a change in the currently dominant ontology and is thereby, fourthly, able to depict new fo rms of collective practice that have been fo re closed. This proposal thus, fifthly, works with-better, within the imaginary of our epoch. But why isn't this just impossible in the previous senses of the term? The answer to this can be seen in the fact that although Jameson's proposal can be neither a political program nor a utopia (and it is both, in the sense of an impossible program and an impossible utopia), he declares it to be the latter. Jameson proposes a utopia

30 Jameson, "An American Utopia." Jameson provides an instructive contextualization of this concept in Va lences of the Dialectic, London: Verso, 2009, 267-78. FRANK RUDA fo r the age of non-utopia.Thereby he counters the alleged impos sibility of utopia production; this means that with the act of propos ing it, utopia again becomes imaginable. But is this not again a Petitio Principi, just an inverted one? It may appear so, but Jameson's text rather fo llows the fo rmal structure of an act that retroactively posits its own conditions of possibility. Jameson's proposal is impossible-not only in the negative sense of the first five aspects of impossibility, but because it actually does something impossible and thereby generates the thinkability, the actuality Wirklichkeit-and concrete imaginability of an "impossible possibility."31 How does this positively relate to the present situa tion? How is doing something impossible related to curing anti _ utopianism? Here it is important to emphasize that the sixth aspect of impossibility relevant here should not be conceived such that Jameson's text embodies a grand heroic gesture, by doing the impossible. Rather its fo rce, its wiz as well as its wit lies in the fact that in the utopian vision the "new world will look exactly like the old one, with but a few minor modifications." This is why doing the impossible by articulating an impossible proposal ultimately is not at all different fr om proposing just a few minor, even modest modifications. And it is in these minor modifications (and, of course, in the fu ndamental consequences they will produce) where the true point of impossibility lies to which the imaginary impo tence is lifted and to which one can hold on, no matter what simply because although this is precisely what may seem impossi ble, it is just a modest proposal. In a beautiful poem with the title "Communism Is the Middle Term," Bertolt Brecht once made a similar point:

To call fo r the overthrow of the existing order May seem a terrible thing But what exists is no order.

31 Alain Badiou, Peut-onpenser la politique? Paris: Seuil, 1985, 101. JAMESON AND METH OD: ON COM IC UTOPIAN ISM 199

To seek refuge in violence May seem evil. But what is constantly at work is violence ... Communism is not an extreme outlier ... Communism is really the most minimal demand What is nearest, reasonable, the middle term.32

Radical change is nothing that especially radical and violent, rather it is just the most reasonable and minimal demand.33 One may thus say, and this derives precisely fr om the modest and reasonable nature of the proposal that what one is encountering here is some thing which is at the same time impossible, but also modest, even necessary-as it is the reasonable thing to do. It is necessary and impossible at the same time (and one should not fo rget that this is one possible definitionof the Real). By suggesting such a point (or points?) of impossibility and demonstrating its necessity, the previous impotence of the collective imaginary is overcome and the impossible becomes imaginable and it can be imagined precisely because it only takes a few minor modificationsto produce it. But-and this is crucial to fu rther deter mine the sixth aspect of impossibility, which is linked to the undecid ability between political program and utopia at work here-as soon as the utopian proposal becomes imaginable it immediately changes its character. We find an impossible point to cling to that is nonethe less modest and starts to imagine a minimal change that has radical consequences, and in this very moment the utopia loses its utopian

32 Bertolt Brecht, "Der Kommunismus ist das Mittlere," in Die Gedichte, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000, 182, translated and cited in Alain Badiou, "Poetry and Communism," in Th e Age of the Poets and Other Wr itings on Twentieth-Century Poetryand Prose, ed. and trans. Bruno Bosteels, London: Verso, 2014. 33 Walter Benjamin wrote that Brecht, in line with this, once stated: "It is not communism that is radical, it is capitalism that is radical." Cf. Walter Benjamin, Un derstanding Brecht, London: Verso, 2003, 33. 200 FRANK RUDA quality. Why? Because as soon as we reach this point, the proposed utopia immanently turns out to be a political program after all. We here encounter the proper reason fo r the undecidability, the impossibility of distinguishing between program and utopia: in a first move, the very act of proposing an impossible utopia posits its own conditions of possibility--creates a new possible imaginary-and as soon as this act is performed there is a second retroaction involved, that leads to the fact that afterthe act the utopia will always have been a political program. It is a redoubled retroaction that generates the indistinguishability of utopia and political program. We can see here why treating the imaginary paralysis and impotence produced through the bundle of impossibilitiesopens the imaginary to something real it reintroduces something of the Real into the imaginary. Before its articulation, it can be neither, and through its very articulation it is somehow both, utopia as well as program. The sixth aspect of impos sibility is thus not only linked to the fact that program and utopia both today seem impossible, but that as soon as we treat the very imaginary constitution of their impossibility, what seems to be an impossible utopia always will have been a real, possible political program. On a formal level, the methodology of Jameson's cure for contemporary anti-utopianism operates according to the following logic: first as (impossible) utopia, then as (possible) political program.

Beginning the Cure: The Method of Embracing What One Fears

We may here raise the question of how precisely to begin the therapy envisaged thus far. How do we make the first concrete steps that enable the cultural revolution Jameson envisages if we cannot rely on what Habermas would call the " constraint-f ree fo rce ofthe better argument" ?34

34 Jiirgen Hahermas, Th e Theoryof Communicative Action, Vol. 1: Reason and the Rationali:r..ation of Society, Boston: Beacon Press, 1984, 28. JAMESON AN D METHOD: ON COM IC UTOPIANISM 201

Jameson contends that it is similar to "the best treatment fo r neurotics," which "lies in indirection." This means "utopiansmust proceed like that: they have to concentrate not on visions of future happiness"-this would be the problematic idea of a too progressivist "cure" that solves all contemporary problems in a perfect future society-"but rather on treatments of that stubborn resistance we tend to oppose to it." He goes on to state that "every utopia today must be a psychotherapy of anti-utopian fe ars and a drawing of them out into the light of day ...they must be indulged, fo r nothing cures a sad passion as fully as its passionate embrace, its wholehearted endorsement." How does one embrace precisely those things that are feared, or the fears themselves? To clarifythis therapeuticmaneuver, a well-known joke, oftenused by Slavoj ZiZek, can help: A worker in Stalin's Russia is sentenced to some years in the gulag. Before he leaves, assuming that all of his letters will be censored, he proposes a plan of how to get messages through anyhow. His plan is to write everything that is true in blue, everything else in red ink. When his friends receive a first letter, it states how beautiful Siberia is, how nice all the people are, especially the guards, how he feels much more healthy after long days of hard physical exercise outside in the nicely cold fr esh air. Everything is perfect; there is only one thing missing.There is no red ink. This joke illustrates that the very language, the very medium in which we articulate what is wrong can be lacking. This is why good arguments in these situations do not help. The problem then does not simply consist in not having a program of how to deal with the situation at hand; it also consists in not being able to perceive problems as problems, fo r example that one 's anti-utopian fe ars are part of the alleged impossibility of utopias.35 Therefore, the therapy also has to findthe right language to recognize where

35 To be more precise here: Utopianism always suggests solutions with out problems, whereas its counterpart, political theory, articulates problems without solutions. It is easy to see which to choose. 202 FRANK RUDA and what the problems are. Jameson's proposal therefore entails an answer to the question of how to invent a language, a red ink, to express what cannot be articulated in the present situation, and how to perceive problems as what they are. But this means that the question to be answered is: How to articulate what seems impossible? One can see in Jameson's proposal a method that is also present in the works of thinkers like Alain Badiou or Slavoj Zizek directly embracing what one fears. This is a peculiar strategy: Both of them resurrect concepts and ideas that seemed to be lost (forever) to the politically wrong and reactionary side. Both of them often articulate their positions by recourse to concepts that seem impossible; that is to say, the language to articulate what seems impossible is, can be, or maybe even has to be itself an impos sible language. Recall, for example, Badiou's perpetual defense of the concept of discipline fo r any emancipatory conception of political subjectivity today. Even though discipline sounds to the average social democratic or liberal ears of today like a concept that is of no use for present political fr ameworks, the very fe ar it generates is an index that there is more at stake. It necessarily seems to imply authoritarianism and unegalitarian hierarchy that cannot but appear conservative or reactionary and is therefore fo rbidden, impossible terrain fo r thinking reforms and revolu tions, but also utopias that want to avoid the danger of totalitarian ism and the like. Yet against the widespread cynical opinion, Badiou insistently points out that there is nothing inherently reac tionary in the concept of discipline. It is rather true that by brand ing discipline as a reactionary concept, the very fact is obscured that "those who have nothing, have only their discipline."36 The assumption to be countered here is that without financial assets one cannot achieve anything today. Badiou opposes this doxa

36 Alain Badiou, "'We Need a Popular Discipline': Contemporary Politics and the Crisis of the Negative," Critical Inquiry 34( 4), 2008, 645-59. JAM ESON AND METH OD: ON COMIC UTOPIAN ISM 203 by emphasizing that those who have no material means are not necessarily lost and impotent, since it is not impossible fo r them to practically organize themselves. It is rather the idea of strict disci pline that provides an answer of how to overcome this alleged prac tical impossibility: it changes something in the imaginary. The method here is thus to take up a concept fo r rethinking emancipa tion that seemed to be impossible fo r doing so, as it comes with the wrong (historical, epistemological, therefore ontological and hence practical as well as imaginary) coloring. Following the same logic, Badiou recently even took up again the concept of the master, of the political leader, which Zizek also advocates in a similar vein. Zizek has also applied this methodological strategy in many cases. One of them-instructive fo r the J amesonian take on cultural revo lution-consisted in intervening in a debate after Angela Merkel contended the necessity of a German Leitkultur (dominant culture) to solve problems of "social integration of immigrants." Zizek proposed to not renounce the concept of a Leitkultur, although it cannot but sound reactionary to the core, but to affirmthe need fo r a left Leitkultur-as the concept as such entails the dominance of a certain cultural fo rmation and education. In more general terms, this method of embracing what one allegedly cannot but fear is systematically linked to the very fo un dation of psychoanalysis-and it is thus no surprise that it comes to be an important means in Jameson's own rendering of anti utopian therapy. Since Freud did not simply discover the uncon scious, psychoanalysis as such should be understood as an inven tion of a new "red ink" (and hence as a "technique" truly understanding the nature of the problem at hand). Freud does provide a paradigm of this very methodological gesture, fo r exam ple when he attacks the "illusion of there being such a thing as psychical freedom" and opts for complete psychical determinism.37

37 Sigmund Freud, In troductoryLectures on Psycho-Analysis, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1966, 59. 204 FRANK RUDA

The choice between freedom and determinism-in whose regard Freud opts fo r the less sexy side-mirrors the logic of the famous ultimatum "Your money or your life!" In this situation, we have to choose giving away our money, as otherwise we would lose both our money and our lives. In this sense, the choice between free dom and determinism is overdetermined by one of the two sides of the choice. Speaking about a choice that is predetermined may seem intuitively wrong. However, we cannot but opt fo r what seems wrong, namely the determinism that occurs in the deter mined character of the choice itself. This situation can, of course, provoke resistance. We fear determinism, as it seems to abolish freedom, yet this fe ar needs to be confronted and embraced. Freud's point is that opting fo r what seems to be the wrong side enables something true to emerge. In the choice between freedom and determinism, fr eedom ultimately implies a direct attack on rationalism, since it basically leads to the idea that some things just happen fo r no reason at all (recall: this is how the free markets work today) and that no rational account of them can be given. Freud avoids giving up rationalism. This implies choosing determinism, which comes with the rationalist claim that there is nothing in the human psyche which is not determined, that is, unexplainable, irra tional, or irrelevant per se. There is thus nothing ephemeral in the human psyche any longer-everything is equally valid and deserves the same attention. This equality derives from opting for what seems very counterintuitive at first sight. With this peculiar rever sal, we can see that allegedly ephemeral phenomena even lead more directly into the core of human subjectivity. Thereby Freud inverts not only the hierarchy between what is accidental and what is essen tial, but the relation between what is considered to exist (possibly) and what is impossible. This inversion is the invention of a new red ink. Inventing a new ink means to speak in an impossible language words that articulate an impossible proposal. Yet it is only from opting for something seemingly impossible that something true can emerge-and this is a rationalist position at the same time. JAM ESON AND METHOD: ON COMIC UTOPIAN ISM 205

One can clearly see this method at work in Jameson's text: in his-nearly Badiouian-defense of discipline that privileges Trotsky's idea of disciplined army organization against "the democratic platitudes of Kautsky and the social democrats," in his rehabilitation of the idea of nationalization, in his defense of bureaucracy, in his positive revivificationof the concept of cultural revolution, and most obviously in what makes the core of his proposal: his defense of the army (as national, auto-bureaucratic, culturally revolutionary tool). But this method is also at work in an inverted fo rm in denouncing precisely those concepts, ideas, and even branches of thought that seem to be fo rever inscribed into any conception of political or social change and fo r which it seems impossible to abandon them. This is at stake in his plea fo r the withering away of political theory altogether (for its object is ultimately the state), in his demand to give up the idea of govern ment as such, and in his attack on any notion of efficiency or progress. So what one encounters here is the concrete language of an impossible proposal, the very impossible materiality of an impos sible proposal. It is made fr om resurrected impossible concepts and purified from all-too-possible ideas and conceptions. One could even say that the very language in which an impossible proposal is articulated is neither a possible language nor simply its negation. It is rather an un-language-it is written un-words, un-categories that enable us to formulate and bring about an impossibility that is at the same time necessary. What are the firstwords, then? They emerge fr om a fo reclosure generated by the practical inefficiencyof the distinction of revolu tion and reform and the efficiencyof cynicism. They are fo rgotten words that are not simply recalled by Jameson, but rather endowed with a certain fo rce through the repetition of what was at stake with them-and one should recall that there are always things one cannot remember but can only access via repetition. These words are dual power. They neither indicate change in the classical revo lutionary manner-it is not a Big Bang theory of political 206 FRANK RUDA transformation that assumes there can be an ultimate cure-nor do they entail reformist internal modificationsof the system-it is not a theory of endless approximation of a better state of things, nor a theory of constant progress. So neither no change nor abso lute cure nor progress. Rather, they indicate another kind of theory of transition, a theory that is itself transitory (this is why it is first a utopia and then a political program). A third kind of transition to play this pun on Spinoza's terminology-out of capitalism, produced by the method of embracing what one seeks to flee.

Where the Impossible Lies, There Also Grows That Which Makes Us Laugh: Comic Utopianism

Anyone who has read Jameson's piece knows that the third kind of transition out of capitalism, which goes under the fo rmal name of dual power, is the universalized army, brought about by general national conscription, including both sexes and anyone from ages sixteen to sixty. The introduction of this generalized institution-a word which will receive a radically new meaning-generates a "new social structure" as it will not only be able to generate gather ings of "unmanageable crowds," but also produce the necessity of collective self-organization that would effectively make the state and any kind of government useless by universalizing bureaucracy in such a manner that anyone becomes his or her own bureaucrat. 38

38 Jameson here makes a point in which Hegel's infamous idea of quantity turning into quality resonates-the universal army will (quantitatively) include so many people that it will qualitatively change the concept of the army such that it will become unmanageable. As admirable as this point is, I am not entirely sure why the immense quantity of people included in the universal army neces sarily makes this army unmanageable-this is an important point, because from this Jameson also derives that this army will be unable to wage fo reign wars or coups. This also has to do with the question of whether there could still be room fo r something like a political leader-a kind of Hegelian monarch, maybe? JAMESON AND METHOD: ON COMIC UTOPIANISM 207

This is, then, "a new kind of non-state." The universal army would thereby be able to deal with many, if not all contemporary prob lems-actually, it would provide solutions to problems that are not even perceived as problems, including that ofthe health care system. It would provide general public education, a universal fo od supply, universal housing, and universal employment and would even leave everyone with sufficient time to create cultural products, do noth ing, or spend time with idiotic things. This would produce-and this is one cultural revolutionary aspect of it-new habits ofliving, being, and acting together; in short, it would produce a new and universal disciplined second nature. This utopian proposal does therefore not-as political theory in its history almost always did-entail the idea of a new constitution; rather, one can read in it the attempt to "rethink revolution" and to take the concept of the collective seriously. This utopia proposes a model of collective action and organization that includes an entirely new articulation of how to think of sociality. It provides a vision of a new collective fetish, which is what fo r Jameson provides the very cohesion of what is often called the social bond. This collective fe tish, through the mediating organizational structure of the army, through the "forced association" and "experience of social promiscuity" it implies, is the collective itself: "the team as social being."39 This vision of a new and "different motivational system" will, through the fu nctioning of the collective fe tish, generate a new consciousness of unity, because it allows fo r a "collective transforma tion of mentalities"-and this is why there is a positive element of nationalism involved, which will even precipitate on the language used by the collective. Yet, this new sense of unity and (why not?) solidarity will not simply be unifyingand level down all particularity

39 Jameson, "An American Utopia." I think that it would be interesting to attempt to imagine a nonfetishistic kind of collective political action and organization that somehow still compulsively circles around "some thing," but does not "objectify" it. But I leave this debate fo r another time and place. 208 FRANK RUDA and singularity of its members. It will certainly break the fetish of singularity so determining in late capitalism, but it will effectively fu nction-as all society does fo r Jameson, only a little bit different as a "collectionof neurotics of various kinds." In the universal army we will still all be freaks, so to speak, but freaks who are fo rced to live together-in the very spatial sense of this expression. Here one can see how the therapy of anti-utopianism-embracing one 's fe ars- truly structures Jameson's whole proposal, since it is precisely through the fo rced association of the universal army that one is also fo rced to embrace what Jameson sees as one of the most constitutive fears inscribed into human nature: a concept he revivifies as "strate gic essentialism," "the primordial fear of the Other." In this sense, antagonisms will still result fr om this fear, yet these antagonisms will be independent fr om any class structure whatsoever. One could assume that precisely because of this primordial fe ar, this proposal, if one starts imagining it, cannot but arouse a "true horror of" this military "democracy," a "terror of the collec tive"-in short: precisely the fe ar that one needs to embrace. Yet, when Jameson presented his proposal fo r revolutionizing society at the Graduate Center at the City University of New Yo rk, it did not cause panic or terror but laughter. Not the kind of laughter that does not take a proposal seriously and ridicules it, but rather authentic laughter. How to explain this? I want to end by arguing that this is not a displaced or false reaction to Jameson's proposal, but fu lly adequate, as it can be-and maybe should be-read as what I want to call a comic utopia (and maybe this is the first one written, maybe in a new, comic red ink). Why should this proposal be comic? For at least three reasons. The firstone has to do with its origin. Jameson writes:

It is a thought that must have first come to me many years ago, inspired by an image by one of our greatest political cartoonists ... Ike, presumably in fu ll military regalia, perches informally on the edge of the desk in the Oval Office and observes conversationally, JAMESON AND METHOD: ON COM IC UTOPIANISM 209

"Well, if they want socialized medicine, they have only to join the army as I did. "40

The origin of the utopian vision is a joke, presented in a cartoon and if this is the case, how could not the whole vision also be of a comic nature?41 One can add to this trivial reason a trivial second one: that some implications of Jameson's proposal are just hilari ous. Recall the idea to place all pacifists in control of arms develop ment and arms storage; the charming idea of the Psychoanalytic Placement Bureau, which will be in charge of organizing all employment as well as personal and collective therapies; and maybe even the idea (which provoked a lot of laughter when presented) that the state will wither away into some enormous group therapy where we will all constantly confront our own fear toward the others and our symptoms resulting fr om it-a constant therapy that is constant because we can simply not escape it. But the most fundamental reason fo r the comic nature of this utopia lies, to my mind, in the very way it does something impos sible. This point can be clarified by recourse to a joke with which Zupancic closes her book on comedy:

Mujo is describing to Haso his adventures in the Sahara.-I'm walking through the desert. Nothing but sand around me, not a living soul, absolutely nothing ... Suddenly a lion appears in fr ont of me. What to

40 Jameson, "An American Utopia." One should here recall that Jameson already once proposed another kind of utopia with regard to a possible refunc tioning of Walmart, which is comic in its own terms. See Jameson, Va lences of the Dialectic, London: Verso, 2010, 410-34. Maybe one should read these two comic utopias together and propose the following fo rmula: Universal mili tarization + refunctioned Walmart = communism? 41 I cannot discuss the difference between jokes and comedy here, but anyone wo rking on comedy cannot but refer to one book that admirably elab orates this distinction: Alenka ZupanCic, The Odd One In : On Comedy, Cambridge: MIT, 2008. 210 FRANK RUDA

do, where to hide?-1 climb a tree ... -Wait a minute, Mujo, you've just told me that there was nothing around but sand, so where did the tree come fr om?-My dear Haso, you don't ask such questions when a lion appears! You run away and climb the first tree. 42

Zupancic reads this not as a joke neglecting human reality as such, but rather as "full recognition of the Real of human desire" that is able "to suddenly make a tree emerge in the middle of the desert. "43 Doesn't the anti-utopian therapy of Jameson's impossible proposal function precisely like this? Doesn't one here witness the emer gence of a new universal egalitarian society in the middle of the political desert? Jameson's therapeutic method takes again into account the Real of human desire-and maybe this is what utopia here ultimately designates-and reinscribes it into the collective imaginary, whereby one actually comes to believe that it does not take much and it is possible to imagine and do the impossible. This method is similar to what Mujo does in the desert, or, to use another image, to Baron Miinchhausen pulling himself out of a mire by his own hair-which, maybe not accidentally, Jameson once in pass ing compared to what Hegel calls Aujhebung.44 To sublate the current paralysis of the collective imaginary, comic utopianism, the Jameson kind, may actually be the best working therapy. Its aim is to enable us to do, think, and imagine the impossible. Its slogan may be: Where the impossible lies, there also grows that which makes you laugh away your fear of change.

42 Zupancic, The Odd One In , 218. 43 Ibid. 44 Jameson, Va lences ofthe Dialectic, 153. 8

After October, Before February: Figures of Dual Power

Alberto Toscano

From now on your first imperative should be: "Imagine!" And your second, immediately connected to the first: "Fight against those who cultivate the weakening of this faculty." -Gunther Anders, The Molussian Catacomb

Reformism is our utopia.' That's a reasonable conclusion to draw fr om the discourse accompanying the recent recomposition and electoral surge of the Southern European left. Politicians who came of age in the neoliberal nineties, and whose image of

This essay incorporates, in revised fo rm, passages from two previous attempts at tackling this issue: "Dual Power Revisited," originally published in the now-discontinued journal Soft Targets, and "Tragedie et transition," published in the online journal Piriode. Thanks to Sebastian Budgen fo r bibliographic suggestions. 212 ALBERTO TOSCANO antagonism was durably shaped by the so-called anti-globalization movement, now address their ideological constituencies with a simple, sober message: what constituted the policy common sense of the postwar European compact between state, capital, and labor across the social-democratic and Christian-Democrat divide namely a welfare state driven by a regulative ideal of expansive social citizenship-is now both the "point of the impossible" (to use Badiou's formulation) of the European order, and the only basis on which to build a national popular consensus against auster ity, not so much beyond but beforelef t and right.2 In "An American Utopia," Jameson, consistent with his convic tion that one must struggle indefatigably fo r social democracy to learn the lessons of its bankruptcy/ inscribes this moment of opposi tion not as a component of a transitional program fo r the present, but as a "discursive struggle" that can be waged in the representa tional sphere by a retooled party-political cadre-but is ultimately discontinuous with the business of materially challenging capitalist power. This predicament is a product not only of what Jameson frames as the twin implosion of the revolutionary and reformist paths, of Leninist wars of maneuver and social-democratic wars of position-which is to say, of the strategic horizons of all the Internationals of the socialist and communist movements-but of the very collapse of Gorz's framing distinction between reformist reforms and nonreformist reforms: all reformism, understood as a durable if gradual transformation of the status quo in the direction of greater equality and fr eedom, is stamped by neoliberalism with the mark of impossibility. The depressing pantomime of Eurogroup meetings with Greece 's Syriza-led government has certainly

2 See Pablo Iglesias, Politics in a Time of Crisis: Podemos and the Future of Democracy in Europe, trans. Lorna Scott Fox, London; Verso, 2015. 3 Fredric Jameson, "Lenin and Revisionism," in Lenin Reloaded, ed. Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj Zizek, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007, 69. AFTER OCTOBER, BEFORE FEBRUARY 213 testifiedto this. 4 In any instance, the fact that contemporary radical ism must articulate its mass appeal by confrontationally refunction ing the non-utopian fe atures of reformism as the basis fo r a rupture with the status quo is instructive. It appears to corroborate Jameson's diagnosis of the imaginative and ideological closure ofthe present a closure that, as we can currently witness, is violently reproduced, not a mere emanation of capital's religion of everyday life-even as it instantiates the very discursive struggle toward which he gestures.

Though a diffuse if ineffective "anticapitalism" has been absorbed as a kind of common sense in what remains of the left and beyond (including in regressive or reactionary fo rmations), the orientation toward reformism as a kind of katechon or emergency brake against neoliberal devastation is another signal that the question of transi tion remains opaque or unthinkable fr om within contemporary crit ical thought.5 To talk of transition in these times-which may be times of riots, but are also times of stasis, reaction, and counterrev olutions-without-revolutions-may appear in bad taste, as when, to use the old situationist turn of phrase, one speaks with corpses in one 's mouth. Not only does such a discussion seem out of place and out of time, considering the global balance of fo rces, but all the major variants of what we could call a "communist orientation" in political thought seem premised on the rejection of transition. This rejection concerns all the components of this concept: The time of transition, understood in terms of the linearity of stages. The sp ace

4 I won't address here whether a strategic delinking fr om the euro could serve as a horizon of nonreformist reforms in view of a transitional project, as recently argued by Costas Lapavitsas. See S. Budgen and C. Lapavitsas, "Greece: Phase Two," jacohin, March 12, 2015. 5 On reformism as katechon, see my "Reforming the Unreformahle," in Wh at Are We Struggling For? A Radical Collective Man ifesto,London: Pluto, 2012. 214 ALBERTO TOSCANO of transition, whether a commune, state, enclave, or zone. The politicalform and subjectivity of transition, embodied by the party and related institutions. Accompanying these negations, these assertions of obsolescence, is a more encompassing rejection of the "progressive" philosophy of history underlying the classical image of transition, with its anal ogies between the institution and the destitution of capitalism and between bourgeois and proletarian revolutions. A repudiation of the transitional imaginaries of the Internationals is present in so-called communization theory, in which the limits to capital and the termination of the notion that revolution could grow out of workers' identity and their place within the productive process ("programmatism") lead to the conclusion that only immediate communist measures could carry a revolutionary process. 6 But it is also present in talk of the commons, where it is the defense or production of nonpropertied spaces and practices of cooperation that will serve as the lived basis fo r emancipation, not a project of systematically disarticulating state and capital through a unified political strategy. The various species of anarchist prefigurationist activism also repudiate the very problem of transition, which appears to them as indelibly tainted with the history of state social isms. Painting with a very broad brush, we could suggest that not only do such contemporary antagonistic perspectives reject the whole vocabulary of transition-for reasons that may be ethical, strategic, or analytical, having to do with a diagnosis of our capital ist present and its affordances-they also largely steer clear of utopian programs, preferring a negative utopian impulse or, at times, concrete utopias which join the desire fo r insurrection with the emergence of "communes," growing out of the collective

6 I have discussed communization in "Now and Never," in Communi{ation and Its Discontents, ed. Benjamin Noys, New York: Autonomedia, 2011, and the problem of transition in "Transition Deprogrammed," South Atlantic Quarterly113.4 , 2014. AFTER OCTOBER, BEFORE FEBRUARY 215 practice of groups without requiring-so the story goes-the prior drawing up of plans, programs, or blueprints. As negative utopias, it is often unclear whether they should be classifiedas utopias of no power, as Jameson suggests has increasingly been the case post-

1968, or as utopias of new power. 7 To put it in other terms, whether they are anti-programmatic anti-utopias or hyperutopias of revolu tionary creativity-where what is utopian is precisely the notion that the crumbling of social reproduction will give way to endemic communist cooperation, in a massively generalized "learning by doing." But fo r a true utopian position, the path is not entirely made by walking, to paraphrase the famous poem by Machado.

It would be relatively easy, though possibly futile, to plunge into the messy archive of actual revolutions to show how the heroic stereotype of transition was openly declared by its supposed parti sans to bear only a very tenuous relationship to actual revolution ary practice. It is all the more ironic that in some micro-habitats of the far left people still polish their Lenin fe tishes, ignoring how Bolshevik political practice broke, at different times, with almost all the ingredients of a linear logic of transition-skipping suppos edly necessary stages, acknowledging the sociological disappear ance of the very working class it was meant to represent, tactically re-establishing dimensions of capitalism after its accelerated

7 I would dissent here fr om Jameson's association of political phobias about power with the work of Michel Foucault. Though, fr om the vantage points of a declining New Left, the carceral panorama of Discipline and Punish may have heralded a suffocating vision of power, rekindling the anarchist flame in the process, the veritable industry that has emerged around Foucault's lectures on neoliberalism, with its fo cus on power as a "conduct of conduct" that presupposes subjective freedom, has fu nctioned to disperse opposition to systemic power, often alongside the capacity to even name it. 216 ALBERTO TOSCANO demise in war communism, and so on. Crucially, the symbolic force of linear transition was the counterpart of the conditions of unevenness and non-contemporaneity that marked all twentieth century revolutionary experiences. Though it may have appeared as its stubborn shadow, we could say that twentieth-century revo lutionary modernity was overdetermined by the persistence of non-capitalist modes of production, and of a non-capitalist peas antry. Those revolutions were all revolutions "against Capital," in the young Gramsci's sense. That is the truth-kernel behind the cynical statements that revolutions were but ruses of capitalist modernization-that communism, as the Eastern European joke went, was simply the longest path between capitalism and capital ism-with contemporary China as the most massive confirmation of that punch line. Conversely, what for some appears as the basis of a true revolution, the real subsumption of life by capital, the termination of all outsides and lags, has in many respects revealed itself as revolution's medusa. In Henri Lefebvre 's formulation, fr om The Production of Sp ace: "the space that contains the realized preconditions of another life is the same one as prohibits what those preconditions make possible." So it seems that transition was on the agenda when conditions were immature, and it is off the agenda in situations where capital has saturated our lifeworlds, terminating other modes of production. Beyond reflectingon this irony-which is hardly a recent discovery anyhow-are there reasons to retain the idea of transition?

At the crux of Jameson's essay is the conviction, which I think is unimpeachable, that to unblock the atrophied strategic imagi nary of the left a new conception of transition is necessary. It is striking nevertheless that transition is so closely associated here with the problem ofposi tive utopia (and not just of the negative AFTER OCTOBER, BEFORE FEBRUARY 217 utopian impulse toward another future). After all, with relation to the Marxist tradition, it could even be argued that the problem of transition-as formulated in the "Critique of the Gotha Programme," State and Revolution, and numerous other tracts and programs-was profoundly anti-utopian in intention, delin eating the strategic outlines of how the power of state and capital could be disarticulated while sidelining frameworks that would see revolution as a matter of implementing a utopian schema. (Here we would really need to reflecton how the partial Bolshevik achievement of transition led to an absolute explosion of concrete and speculative utopias, fr om projects of deurbanization to orchestras without conductors. 8) This is even more the case fo r what Jameson presents here as the "third" transition (after revo lutionary war of maneuver and reformist war of position), dual power. In Lenin's fo rmulation the latter appears as an extreme anomaly or aberration, a true Russian exception that expresses the extremely unique conditions in which the deficiency of the bourgeois revolution and the premature irruption of the prole tarian one overlap. There is a kind of dialectical perversity in Jameson's choice of dual power as the instrument through which to refunction both transition and utopia fo r a seemingly closed present. To gauge its effects, a detour through some figures of dual power is required.

In 1917, during the tumultuous interregnum between the collapse of tsarism and the October revolution, Lenin stresses the unprec edented emergence of a wild anomaly in the panorama of political

8 See Richard Stites's wonderful Revolutionary Dreams: Utop ian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. 218 ALBERTO TOSCANO forms: dual power. As he remarks in Pravda, "alongside the Provisional Government, the government of the bourgeoisie, another government has arisen, so far weak and incipient, but undoubtedly a government that actually exists and is growing the Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies."9 The often ster ile disputations over the evils and virtues of the seizure of state power tend to obscure the far greater challenge posed by thinking revolutionary politics in terms of the sundering of power-not just in the guise of a face-offbetween two (or more) social fo rces in a situation of non-monopoly over violence and political author ity, but in the sense of a fu ndamental asymmetry in the types of power. The power wielded by the soviets is incommensurable with that of its bourgeois counterpart, however "democratic" it may be, because its source lies in popular initiative and not parliamentary decree, because it is enforced by an armed people and not a stand ing army, and because it has transmuted political authority from a plaything of the bureaucracy to a situation where all officialsare at the mercy of the popular will and its power of recall. The model fo r this power of a new type is the Paris Commune. It is the incipi ent, larval fo rm of "a state of the type of the Paris Commune" that, in the spring and summer of 1917, coexists with the parliamentary type of state, the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie." In the tradition that draws fr om Lenin's texts-yet another case in Marxism where ephemeral and exceptional categories are, fo r better and fo r worse, turned into transhistorical or at least transsituational ones-this notion of dual power as the consolidation of embryonic institu tions of the "non-state state" of the proletariat is critical. Gramsci himself will speak of a state in potentia. From the juridical stand point, dual power as an embryo of workers' power is also a site of legitimacy without legality, and thus the incubator or political condenser of a new legality, which is also to say new relations of

9 V. I. Lenin, "The Dual Power," April 9, 1917. AFTER OCTOBER, BEFORE FEBRUARY 219 power based on the direct initiative of the masses.10 But fo r such a preparation of new power to take place, the notion of dual power demands a deep fo rm of pre-existent collective identity-no doubt one politically mediated and consciously intensified by these insti tutions, but nevertheless one that sinks its roots in class belonging. (We will return to this question of the social basis of dual power below.)

To return to the context of interregnum, the soviets, which were not yet under Bolshevik hegemony, live in the constant menace, exacerbated by the partisans of reform, of a neutralizing absorp tion into a state power that in principle suffers no duality (in this sense, Lenin and Trotsky are "Weberian," and the great German sociologist will indeed return the favor by quoting Trotsky himself to back up his famous fo rmulations on the monopoly of violence). In such a conjuncture, the only strategy is to strengthen the new type of power, "clarifying proletarian minds ... emancipating them fr om the influence of the bourgeoisie," since "as long as no violence is used against the people there is no other road to [state] power." The problem of constituting a potent communist bloc and consolidating the new type of power into a fo rce that can truly sap the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is thus a problem of autonomy and separation, of the disciplined, painstaking constitution of a proletarian political capacity (another key sense of power) that takes its distance fr om the apparatus of the state precisely in order to prepare its "smashing." This process of constitution is marked by an inexorable temporal determination. The "interlocking" of

10 Riccardo Guastini, "Materiali per una teoria del doppio potere," in I due poteri: Stato borghese e stato op eraio nell'analisi marxista, Bologna: Il mulino, 1978. 220 ALBERTO TOSCANO two dictatorships gives rise to an exceedingly volatile amalgam, whence the axiom: "Two powers cannot exist in a state."" Dual power is thus both an opportunity and a menace, the terrain where autonomy and initiative can be quashed or squandered. This is the sense in which, in June 1917, Lenin, facing a capitalist offensivein the domain of production itself, declares: "The root of the evil is in the dual power."12 And the culprits of this crisis, the harbingers of the "evil," are precisely those subjects who seek to serve as hinges between the two powers, the "Naro dniks and Mensheviks" who lead the soviets (the power of the majority) in the interests of the bourgeoisie (the dictatorship of the minority). In any case, "this dual power cannot last long." This merely transitory kairos that dual power represents, fo unded on the lethal contest between the two dictatorships-the two types of power-means that Lenin cannot accept the "fetishism" of the soviet as an organ of self government (which might even be compatible with certain bour geois parliamentary fo rms) but will seek, through the fundamental instance of the party, in Antonio Negri's gloss, to "fixin the Soviets the immediate expression and political form of class insubordina tion to the general experience of exploitation" and to maintain the dyad "autonomy-organization."13 Without class autonomy there is no organization and without organization, class autonomy independent proletarian political capacity-dissipates. In this context, dual power, as Negri notes-and contrary to the Menshevik vision of incorporating the soviets within the state as a "regional" instance of workers' self-government and self management-is "not an institutionalizable juridical relationship" (we will return to the seeming paradox of an institutionalization of

11 V. I. Lenin, "The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution [Draft Platform fo r the Proletarian Party]," September 1917. 12 V. I. Lenin, "Has Dual Power Disappeared?" 13 Antonio Negri, Fa ctory of Strategy: 33 Lessons on Lenin, trans. Arianna Bove, New Yo rk: Columbia University Press, 2014, 123-4. AFTER OCTOBER, BEFORE FEBRUARY 221 civil war, or stasis). For Negri, the ambiguity of dual power "must be confronted and resolved fr om the workers' perspective: firstof all, its intensification must be advocated, then the proletarian moment of antithesis must be exalted until the foundation of the dictatorship of the proletariat in its Soviet fo rm."

While Jameson enlists dual power in the critique of political theory, of the political as a theoretical and practical chimera, it could be argued that in Lenin's work, precisely as an anomaly, aberration, or exception-albeit one that demands to be seized upon strategi cally-dual power marks out the space fo r a specifically Marxist political thought. This is not a thought of transhistorical norma tivity or of the state and its antinomies, but a thought of the neces sary invention, in situations of crisis, of political fo rms oriented toward the abolition of capital. In his Dual Power in Latin America, the Bolivian theorist Rene Zavaleta Mercado, writing through the unraveling of the incomplete experiences of dual power in Bolivia and Chile in the early seventies, signaled this singularity of the notion of dual power while attending to the conceptual and politi cal history of the notion in Russia and the Southern Cone by refer ring to it as "a Marxist metaphor that designates a special type of state contradiction or a state conjuncture of transition."14 I take this to suggest that unlike the concepts of classical political theory, dual power, as a term trying to approximate the uniqueness of a social and state crisis, does not clearly subsume its cases. In stress ing (and indeed, perhaps overstressing) the difference between Lenin and Trotsky on this matter, Zavaleta Mercado argues that while, in Lenin, the phenomenon of dual power between February

14 Rene Zavaleta Mercado, Elpoder dual en America Latina: Estudio de los casas de Bolivia y Chile, Mexico: Siglo XXI, 197 4, 18. 222 ALBERTO TOSCANO and October is an extremely singular exception to antecedent theories of revolution, an overdetermined fact that demands the invention of an organization and strategic response, for Trotsky's later systematization of the notion of dual power in his history of the Russian Revolution, dual power is a regularity, a social law of revolution that can find its instances in conjunctures as differentas the opposition of parliament and king in prerevolutionary England or of the Constituent Assembly and the monarchy in prerevolu tionary France. Notwithstanding the brilliance of Trotsky's play of historical analogies, fo r Zavaleta Mercado, turning dual power into a social law ultimately dissolves the singularity of Lenin's proposal, which is to name as dual power a phase of qualitative contemporaneity and antagonistic development of two asymmetrical, incommensurable powers, and even more precisely, of two revolu tions, a congenitally malformed bourgeois one and a larval but powerful proletarian one. There is a qualitative asymmetry of powers as well as a quantitative conflict. Of this political uneven ness there isn't really any "law, " but only, I would suggest,jigures . It is one of the extreme weaknesses of "Leninism" as a formamen tis and fetish that it has tried to turn the extremely exceptional circum stances of 1917, and the Bolsheviks' fo rced choices, into a cook book fo r revolutions and insurrections to come. In this respect, dual power-like, in a differentvein, transition itself-is a problem (or a metaphor, in Zavaleta Mercado's sense), not a concept or a theory.

As Negri presents it in his Factoryof Strategy, Lenin's is a constant struggle against the "constitutional mummification" of dual power, the transmutation of the soviets into organs of democratic repre sentation and not of class dictatorship, inserted into the interna tional process of revolution. Communists must always reject this AFTER OCTOBER, BEFORE FEBRUARY 223 transformation; the movement must continue, it must surpass itself. Indeed, some of Negri's most interesting pages in his lessons on Lenin bear on the manner in which capital, in its high reformist moments (e.g., the New Deal), inoculated itself with the soviet fo rm; how it institutionalized the apparatus of self-government in the guise of workers' self-management and their collaborative insertion into the mechanisms and the ideology of industrial work. Against this recuperative dialectic, the autonomist imperative is that of an institutionalization of antagonism, the creation of "class institutions, fo r the class, in the class," the

institutionalizations inside capital of what capitalism can only insti tutionalize fo r the purposes of domination, the consolidation of struggle fo r the purposes of power, and the irreversibility of strug gles fr om the standpoint of struggle itself, of the process of destruc tion of the existing.15

Negri's wager, then, is that the task of repeating Lenin must pass through a reckoning with the transformation in class composi tion (that is, both in the subjective capacity of the class and its insertion into the dynamics of capitalist development) as well as in the very meaning of power. Dual power retains its pertinence, but it is no longer thought exclusively in terms of the state as separate apex and possessor of power but in view of a "tendential identification of capital and the State (a total fu sion of organiza tion and command)." Under these conditions of real subsump tion, there is a plenitude of power, a fu llness of capitalist power and a fu llness of workers' power: the capitalist unification of society and its totalizing organization reproduce over the entirety of the social fabric the fu ll potency of class antagonism, which is essential to the definition of capital. (It is obvious that in Jameson's reflections on the present, this fu llness is rather

15 Negri, Fa ctory of Strategy, 142. 224 ALBERTO TOSCANO unilateral instead, and understandably so.) But if the overall concept of power under conditions of the real subsumption of society under capital cannot be identified with the seizure of state power per se, then, following Negri's argument, we could say that there emerges yet another "new type" of (proletarian) power. Lenin's vision of dual power as a critical and explosive but still transitory stage depended on a certain conception of power that Negri calls a "non-dialectical absolute," not so distant fr om the bourgeois theories of power qua monopoly exemplified by Weber and presaged in classic doctrines of sovereign raison d'etat. On the contrary, the workers' struggles of the '60s and '70s, according to Negri (who does not flinch, in these pages, from invoking Mao as a distant witness), determine a new expe rience and a new concept of power, understood as a "dialectical absolute" allowing "dual power to spread over a long period, as a struggle that upsets the capital relation by introducing into it the worker variable as the conscious will of destruction." This newer type of proletarian power is paradoxically qualified as a fo rm of extremist gradualism, a "gradualness of power and its management which is the gradualness of the destruction of capi talist power, of the capital relation." Whence the thesis that underlies the new sovietism which Negri, at the time immersed in the experience of Potere Operaio, proclaims to be "the trans fo rmation of the concept of insurrection into that of permanent civil war." Without entering into the virtues of such a provoca tive proposal, or indeed how it might relate to a strategic (mis) calculation of class fo rces and class composition, it is worth remarking that the vision of this permanent civil war, and of its new type of prolonged, gradual! destructive dual power, led to an attempt to appropriate and defend physical areas of autonomy and "self-valorization"-"red bases" or liberated zones. The presence of these Maoist concepts points to a key aspect of the autonomist theorization of dual power under conditions of real subsumption, namely its fu sion of two models and practices of AFTER OCTOBER, BEFORE FEBRUARY 225 dual power: first, the intensive and metropolitan "general strike scenario" (the model of urban insurrection present in the Paris Commune, the Petrograd Soviet, or the uprisings in Hamburg, Canton, and Barcelona), which might lead us to interrogate Jameson's distinction between dual power and uprising; second, the extensive and territorial prolonged "popular war scenario," fo r which the Chinese revolution serves as a paragon, and which might lead us to qualify Jameson's separation of dual power from the figure of the enclave.16 On the basis of the conviction of the fu ll (and irreversible?) power of the metropolitan proletariat in its new class composition, the long duration of the people's war is injected into the fabric of the city.

In his more recent work with Michael Hardt, Negri has given a biopolitical twist to these earlier reflectionson dual power. Writing of the legacy of guerrilla warfare, he notes that as it

increasingly adopted the characteristics of biopolitical production and spread throughout the entire fabric of society, it more directly posed as its goal the production of subjectivity-economic and cultural subjectivity, both material and immaterial. It was not just a matter of "winning hearts and minds," in other words, but rather of creating new hearts and minds through the construction of new circuits of communication, new fo rms of social collaboration, and new modes of interaction. In this process we can discern a tendency

16 See Daniel Bensa1d, "On the Return of the Politico-Strategic Question," August 2006, marxists.org, originally published in English as "The Return of Strategy," International Socialism 113, January 2007; La poli tique comme art strategique, Paris: Syllepse, 2010. Also Ben Brewster's reflec tions on the Comintern's manual on Armed Insurrection, signed "Neuberg," in "Armed Insurrection and Dual Power," Ne w LeftReview 66, 1971 . 226 ALBERTO TOSCANO

toward moving beyond the modern guerrilla model toward more democratic network fo rms of organization.17

Is the contemporary horizon fo r a recovery and recasting of the theme of dual power a "biopolitical" one? It is difficult to ignore that whether we are talking about the nonantagonistic fo rms of participatory dual power in the Porto Alegre model, the Zapatista attempt to defend zones for the self-organization of" civil society" against oligarchic repression, or the attempts to articulate fo rms of democracy from below with national popular projects in Bolivia and Venezuela, the biopolitical element (understood both in the sophisticated sense of Hardt and Negri, but also in the simpler sense of welfare) is prominent. 18 The Lebanese Hezbollah is a significant figure in this respect, representing the rise of a kind of "biopolitical Islamism" in a context of dual power. Determined by a very unique historical and political constellation-which combines the anti-Israeli national resistance struggle, a Khomeneist party ideology profoundly modulated by the conditions of a multi confessional Lebanon permanently threatened by relapse into bloody sectarianism, the contradictory support of Syria and Iran, and a wide proletarian Shi'a social base-Hezbollah has thrived in the systematic use of the duality power (military, territorial, moral) and represents a variant of this political fo rm which is irreducible both to the model of the Leninist kairos as well as to that of the people 's war. This variant of dual power instead functions within something like a permanent interregnum, where its power is wielded fo rcefully but not in the sense of a unilateral seizure. Within this volatile geometry of fo rces, the "biopolitical" element provides much of the substance of dual power. In the

17 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: Wa r and Democracy in the Age of Empire, New Yo rk: Penguin, 2005, 81. 18 For " civil society," see the Second Declaration of the Selva Lacandona, 1994. AFTER OCTOBER, BEFORE FEBRUARY 227

"planet of slums" anatomized by Mike Davis, we could even say that the "biopolitical supplement" to the neoliberal evacuation of services and solidarity is inextricable and primary vis-a-vis any mere military strategy. Much of Hezbollah's hegemonic trajectory depends on addressing key questions of the government of life, adopting a "process of advocacy based on extensive fact-finding and teamed with grassroots support." In these Islamist inquiries of sorts, issues such as water problems are addressed through scientific-academic methods (Hezbollah' s Center fo r Developmental Studies) and by encouraging "the formation of residential and professional groups" that can provide the territorial rooting fo r these welfare ventures.19 In a situation of prolonged dual power where the stakes, contrary to those Negri envisions, are precisely based on averting civil war while gaining relative hegemony over a population sidelined by a fr agmented, unequal, and threadbare state (what Judith Palmer Harik simply calls "the abandoned"), dual power is biopower, and daily garbage collection, large-scale health service delivery, and emergency water delivery are weap ons of the first order. Though little if anything can be directly extrapolated fr om a unique situation in which the notion of "balance of power" takes on an intense and tragic if quotidian connotation, Hezbollah's important variant of "biopolitical Islam" hints at some of the contemporary conditions fo r the rethinking and exercise of dual power, where the separation of an autono mous political capacity and the generation of new types of power (whether revolutionary, conservative, or reactionary) cannot bypass the dimension of the production and reproduction of social life-in short, the question of survival. These interstitial, seces sionist, or parallel figures of para-state power are in turn bound to the mutations in the state fo rm itself, which increasingly, especially as concerns territories targeted by neocolonial and neoimperial

19 Judith Palmer Harik, Hezbollah: The Changing Face of Te rrorism, London: LB. Tauris, 2005. 228 ALBERTO TOSCANO operations, no longer posit an overlay of state, territory, and popu lation, but instead propose violent governance by "zones," indexed to the shifting requirements of extraction and security. 20 It is this context of neoliberalism which is shifting the link between capital and spaces of government and jurisdiction and allowing fo r a proliferation, in certain parts of the world, of violently overlap ping authorities and enclaves in conjunctures of incomplete sovereignty.

10.

A possible fo othold fo r beginning to think transition concretely would then be to consider the crucial phenomenon of what we could call a kind of dual biopower-which is to say the collective attempt to appropriate politically aspects of social reproduction that state and capital have abandoned or rendered unbearably exclusionary, fr om housing to medicine. These aspects-which, incidentally, are also the privileged sites fo r any nonreformist reforms one could propose in the current moment-are today the principal organizing bases of successful popular movements, whether progressive or reactionary. But they have also been the fulcrums fr om which to think the dismantling of capitalist social fo rms and relations without relying on the premise of a political break in the operations of power, without waiting fo r "the day after," the seizure or "evaporation" of the repressive apparatus. Though they could be read in a merely ameliorative lens, I think the brutally repressed experiments of the Black Panthers with breakfast programs, sickle-cell anemia screening, and an alterna tive health service fo r the black "lumpen"-to use their own terminology-are one such example, and their articulation with a

20 Badiou stresses this question of zones in his lecture course Images du temps present (2 001-2004), Paris: Fayard, 20 14. AFTER OCTOBER, BEFORE FEBRUARY 229 conception of self-defense not irrelevant to our own time. 21 The "epidemiological dual structure" of which Jameson beguilingly speaks resonates with this, and we should remark the centrality of health to transitional imaginaries in a phase plagued by the crisis of social reproduction (the critical and rational core, to my mind, of discussions on biopolitics): from the ongoing Solidarity fo r All initiatives that accompanied Syriza's rise in Greece to Hazan and Kamo's utopian speculations on how health could be a prominent locus of "first revolutionary measures."22 As we begin to see spatial and temporal "dualities," or sheer fr agmentation and "zoning," in the domain of social reproduction and the fo rma tions of collectivities through the very uneven time and space of crisis, we could also start to think which of these experiences can be propagated or scaled up-not in fantasies of secession, and not in the illusion that post-capitalism is really possible now, but as ways of rooting the need to undo capitalist relations in the real, if partial, experience of attempts to limit its powers and repurpose its (our) dead labors.

11.

Even if, fo llowing Zavaleta Mercado, we treat dual power as a metaphor or problem rather than a universal whose particulars we can inventory, it is still possible to identify some of its elements. In

21 Alondra Nelson, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Partyand the Fight against Medical Discrimination, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013; Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Black Against Emp ire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. 22 Eric Hazan and Kamo, Premieres mesures rivolutionnaires, Paris: La Fabrique, 2013. See the extremely perspicuous critical comments in Jason E. Smith's extended review of this pamphlet, "The Day after the Insurrection: On First RevolutionaryMe asures," Radical Philosophy 189, 2015. ALBERTO TOSCANO light of these, I want to address Jameson's anchoring of his utopian speculation in the "universal army" as a concrete institution of dual power. Whether we identify the space-time of dual power as that of a punctual, if uneven, crisis of the state or in the protracted or "permanent" (if also uneven) crisis of social reproduction, the great majority of invocations of dual power fo llow Lenin's lead in seeing it as inextricable fr om crisis. While war is certainly on the horizon, mediate or immediate, of these debates, to the extent that it is the crisis of the state and its functions that they address, we could say that all the figuresof dual power surveyed above already, to different degrees, respond to Jameson's important entreaty: "We must invent better temporal models of crisis, long- and short term, than those afforded by war." Whether they throw up psychic analogues of war at the level of popular unity is a somewhat differ ent matter, though we might already suggest that total mobiliza tion is perhaps not where the lessons of dual power are to be sought. The second element, along with crisis, is obviously the state: whether they are shadowed, as Bolshevik debates certainly were, by a conception of the state as a unifiedmonopoly of violence that cannot tolerate duality, or whether they conceive the duality (or multiplicity) of powers in terms of a waning or fr agmentation of the state, shedding areas of control or reproduction, the image of dual power is intimately bound to the extant modalities of state power. It is, to quote Zavaleta Mercado again, "a special type of state contradiction or a state conjuncture of transition." This contradiction is exacerbated by the third element I'd like to stress, that of dual power as determined by the emergence of an embryo of alternative power, a qualitativelydiff erent power (and state), which shares and shapes the space-time of the official and legitimate power and which sinks its roots in the capacity of an emergent class, so that-at least in "classical" theories of this ultimately nonclassical notion-dual power as a political term is fo reshad owed by a dual power transpiring fr om the domain of production itself. AFTER OCTOBER, BEFORE FEBRUARY

12.

Jameson's American utopia of dual power appears to fo reground this third element, the identification of an institutional embryo of a power other than that of the capitalist state, to the detriment of the other two. Against the "classic"-i.e., Leninist-figure of dual power, which links this hopeful but unstable strategic aberration to the speci ficity of a general crisis of the state, Jameson stages his search fo r a candidate fo r dual power in terms of the apparent impossibility of the very break in the structures of the state that was the condition of possibility fo r classic dual power in the firstinstance . Where the latter signaled an uneven qualitative interlocking of bourgeois and prole tarian revolution, war of position and war of maneuver, dual power as speculative utopia is occasioned by the seeming occlusion of the very horizon in which these distinctions were possible. Crisis, both in the sense of a more or less punctual political rupture and of the afore mentioned implosion of social reproduction, certainly shadows this valiant speculative effort, but it is not as such integrated into the concept of dual power, save in the fo rm of an indispensable symbolic ingredient, an analogue of war as mobilizing "fetish" fo r a collective. Jameson's communist fabulation shares with many of the utopias he 's so brilliantly analyzed elsewhere a curious relation to political time, which the terminology of dual power exacerbates: on the one hand, the turn to a revised notion of dual power is required by the absence of a prospect of revolutionarycrisis, and thus suggests itself as a mechanism to unblock a situation of cognitive and practical paralysis; on the other, as the reference to Bisson's splendid Fire on the Mountain intimates, such a dual power in real "competition" with the state could only be envisaged af ter a rupture (and it is telling that the greatest twentieth-century proliferation of utopian texts, projects, and experiences took place af ter the Bolshevik revolution and not as its preparation). No doubt, classic dual power itself was both af ter a rupture (February) and before the decisive one (October), but dual power as speculative utopia shifts fr om this determinate ALBERTO TOSCANO light of these, I want to address Jameson's anchoring of his utopian speculation in the "universal army" as a concrete institution of dual power. Whether we identify the space-time of dual power as that of a punctual, if uneven, crisis of the state or in the protracted or "permanent" (if also uneven) crisis of social reproduction, the great majority of invocations of dual power follow Lenin's lead in seeing it as inextricable from crisis. While war is certainly on the horizon, mediate or immediate, of these debates, to the extent that it is the crisis of the state and its functions that they address, we could say that all the figures of dual power surveyed above already, to different degrees, respond to Jameson's important entreaty: "We must invent better temporal models of crisis, long- and short term, than those afforded by war." Whether they throw up psychic analogues of war at the level of popular unity is a somewhat differ ent matter, though we might already suggest that total mobiliza tion is perhaps not where the lessons of dual power are to be sought. The second element, along with crisis, is obviously the state: whether they are shadowed, as Bolshevik debates certainly were, by a conception of the state as a unified monopoly of violence that cannot tolerate duality, or whether they conceive the duality (or multiplicity) of powers in terms of a waning or fragmentation of the state, shedding areas of control or reproduction, the image of dual power is intimately bound to the extant modalities of state power. It is, to quote Zavaleta Mercado again, "a special type of state contradiction or a state conjuncture of transition." This contradiction is exacerbated by the third element I'd like to stress, that of dual power as determined by the emergence of an embryo of alternatiYe power, a qualitatiYelydiff erent power (and state), which shares and shapes the space-time of the official and legitimate power and which sinks its roots in the capacity of an emergent class, so that-at least in "classical" theories of this ultimately nonclassical notion-dual power as a political term is fo reshad owed by a dual power transpiring fr om the domain of production itself. AFTER OCTOBER, BEFORE FEBRUARY

12.

13.

This displacement or black-boxing of dual power as a state crisis of transition can be approached through the debates and shifts the concept has undergone from its initial fo rmulations-in particular its resurgence in the 1970s in Latin American and European debates on dual power and democratic roads to socialism, and the series of theories and practices already alluded to that stress a duality or plurality of powers surfacing out of the state 's abdication of many of its social reproduction fu nctions. In both of these historical and conceptual clusters, we could speak of something like diffuse dual power, while recognizing, in the wake of Zavaleta Mercado's warn ings, that any such diffusion, or indeed generalization, of dual power risks fatally dissolving the notion, watering down its anom aly. While maintaining a classic emphasis on the institutional dual ity of powers in the "same" space-time (namely against the enclave and the "riot-commune" as potential candidates of dual power), Jameson's American utopia inherits from the post-Leninist muta tions of dual power the problem of how to think transitional institu tions outside of a decisive rupture. In this respect, despite opting to retain the terminology of dual power, Jameson's proposal seems to share more with the strategic horizon of Poulantzas's democratic socialism-which envisaged a kind of erosion of the bonds between AFTER OCTOBER, BEFORE FEBRUARY 233 the bourgeoisie and the state-than with the Trotskyist vision of dual power advanced against the Greek philosopher by the young Henri Weber, fo r whom a military-political rupture was indispen sable to retain any conception of revolution-a rupture that would be precipitated by the consolidation of diffuse social dual powers (the plurality of embryos of self-organization and popular power emerging in a protracted situation of social crisis) into a frontal challenge to the capitalist state. 23 Weber thus reasserts the classic perspective that a clash, a decisive rupture with some military dimension, cannot be circumvented, and suggests contra Poulantzas that without full-blown dual power, no rupture is possible. Viewed from the vantage point of the 1970s debates on transition and dual power, Jameson's speculative utopia is somewhat of a centaur trying to articulate the duration of a long march of the institution (in this case the universal army) with a firmcommitment to duality (against Poulantzas's much more "molecular" conception of demo cratic struggles)-and, no doubt due to its US vantage point, which quickly puts paid to any parliamentary illusion, it entirely sidelines the problematic of representation and the party fo rm that domi nated these debates. 24

14.

What then of the provocation of seeking the site of dual power in the army? Set against the often disavowed anarcho-individualist or radical-liberal tendencies of much soi-disant anticapitalism

23 See their 1977 debate on "The State and the Transition to Socialism," now in The Poulant{as Reader: Marxism, Law and the State, ed. James Martin, London: Verso, 2008. 24 The party is, of course, the element of the classical Leninist theory of dual power that serves as a kind of Lacanian point de capiton or 'quilting point' fo r the other three elements: the situation of crisis, the challenge to the state, and the embryos of power. 234 ALBERTO TOSCANO

today, this provocation is of course, as Jameson eventually concedes, the very point of the exercise, serving as a kind of reac tant to reveal our deep-seated fear of the collective. Yet Jameson has anchored his utopia in a fa ct of revolutionary analysis and strategy, so we can be excused fo r also approaching it in that register. The first comment to make in that respect is that Jameson's search in existing institutions fo r his experimental subject of dual power goes against the grain of many of the debates we 've already surveyed. Whether in the cordones industriales or the Asemblea Popular of Chile, the Panthers' health programs, the shura coun cils of the Iranian Revolution, or indeed the Petrograd Council of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, this embryonic revolutionary power is organized around new institutions that fr om the start assert their asymmetry and incommensurability with the extant institutions of the state. Not that the refunctioning of existing institutions is a theme absent from revolutionary theory-far fr om it, as, notwithstanding de rigueur nods to the smashing of the state, most revolutionary practice is nothing but such a refunction ing, with all the contradictions, setbacks, and counterfinalities that entails. And yet that is not the unique problem that dual power has generally been invoked to articulate, or rather not so much to solve as to describe. Now, and this is the second comment I want to make on the universal army, Jameson's utopia turns the classic problem of dual power-in a nutshell, there are but there cannot be two repressive apparatuses in one state, which is also to say two states in one state-into its own solution, by transmuting the army into the dual power itself. Yet in his own description of this utopian army, which emerges in a situation of dual power, and

which begins life as a parallel fo rce alongside the state and its official army [my emphasis] and finds its first tasks and indeed its vocation in the fu lfillment of neglected social services and in a coexistence with the population of a wholly different type, AFTER OCTOBER, BEFORE FEBRUARY 235 we sense that the figure of the situation of dual power is wholly unlike that faced by Lenin, for whom by definition an army couldn't be a locus of dual power. A parallel fo rce (rather than one embroiled in a fr ontal struggle) could only emerge once a rupture had taken place, be it only in the rise of the kind of governmental power that could decree universal conscription as a first transitional measure. But we are arguably here in a rather differentterrain than "classic" dual power; more, perhaps, a contradictory polity in which the duality of powers is experimented with both from above and fr om below, in which (parts of) the state and (parts of) society are involved in a transitional effort that does not take the form of a fr ontal conflict (which would be immediate given the existence of two armies representing different social and political imperatives in the same territory). Whether we want to call this an expanded or diffuse dual power or abandon the terminology altogether (as Poulantzas urged), it is nevertheless evident that we are very much in a post- or non-Leninist horizon. It is a horizon in which the state is neither an instrument nor a fo rtress, but a field of struggle (and whatever Jameson's universal army might be, it still remains in many ways of the state, even or especially as it is envisaged as sapping the anti-emancipatory features of US states). 25 This diffu sion (and potential dissolution) of the problematic of dual power can be located in many disparate moments across the twentieth century: Korsch's councilist proposals fo r socialization fr om above and fr om below; the debate on poder popular in the last months of Allende's Unidad Popular government in Chile26; Negri's specula tions about "permanent dual power" quoted above; but also theo retical efforts by the likes of Sartre or Althusser to think how the

25 See Panagiotis Sotiris, "Neither an Instrument nor a Fortress: Poulantzas's Theory of the State and His Dialogue with Gramsci," Historical Materialism 22.2, 20 14, 135-57. 26 See Franck Gaudichaud, ed.,; Venceremos! Analyses et documents sur le pouYoir populaire au Chili (1970-1973) , Paris: Syllepse, 2013. ALB ERTO TOSCANO party could be reimagined no longer as the monopolist of power, in a different articulation with mass initiatives and fo rms of self organization that would allow us to envisage a non-Leninist poli tics that would still remain resolutely antiliberal, not allowing dual power to devolve into the balance of powers.27 In our own century, this is how some have sought to theorize the institutional experi ments of the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela. 28 Another way to pose this question, which perhaps resonates with Jameson's brac ing reflections on envy, is whether stasis, the division fr acturing a polity, can somehow be institutionalized. Though post-Marxists have unconvincingly interpreted late liberalism as bearing this agonistic politics within it, surely it would be a task of any transi tion to communism to invent modalities of antagonism not steeped in belonging, identity, or class. One might take inspiration here from Solon's stunning decree providing fo r punishment for any citizen who had not taken sides in a civil war. Of course, Solon's proposal depended on the politically reproduced identity of citi zen, and one of the questions we need to ask ourselves in gauging

27 Responding to Rossana Rossanda, also Althusser's interlocutor in the interview on "Marxism as a Finite Theory, " in which he advanced strangely similar views, Sartre says: "At any rate, what seems to me interest ing in your schema is the duality of power which it fo reshadows. This means an open and irreducible relation between the unitary moment, which falls to the political organization of the class, and the moments of self-government, the councils, the fu sed groups. I insist on that word 'irreducible' because there can only be a permanent tension between the two moments. The party will always try, to the degree that it wants to see itself as 'in the service' of the movement, to reduce it to its own schema of interpretation and develop ment; while the moments of self-government will always try to project their living partiality upon the contradictory complex of the social tissue. It is in this struggle, maybe, that can be expressed the beginning of a reciprocal transformation." Jean-Paul Sartre, "Masses, Spontaneity, Party," Socialist Register, 1970 . 28 See especially the stimulating analysis in George Ciccariello-Maher, "Dual Power in the Venezuelan Revolution," MonthlyReview 59.4, 2007. AFTER OCTOBER, BEFORE FEBRUARY 237 the pertinence of dual power today is whether the link between the emergence of an embryonic power and a pre-existing identity-be it of class, ethnos, or community-can be broken. After all, another point in which Jameson's proposal moves beyond revolutionary classicism is by seeing the function of the universal army not only in undoing class distinction but in making possible a dual power that is not itself grounded on class difference-unlike most of those we can encounter in both classical and diffuse figures of dual power. This question is even more urgent inasmuch as what I've called dual biopower very often-though certainly not always, as anti-austerity examples fr om Europe illustrate, fr om the Spanish Platform fo r those Affected by Mortgages (PAH) to Solidarity for All in Greece-roots itself in ethnic, religious, or racialized communities, distant fr om the modernity of nation-state identity fo rmation that still appears to serve as the background of Jameson's reflections.

15.

It is of course the US context of Jameson's utopia that lends the seemingly classical modernity of a national popular army its antisystemic charge, as though a kind of anticipatory nostalgia fo r a Jacobinism pre-empted by US fe deralism pervaded Jameson's vision. Here Jameson's violent excision of a whole welter of American utopias of secession should not go unremarked upon. The abrogation of any radical reference to the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence that preceded it doesn't just cut off the problematic tendency among some US progressives to echo Hannah Arendt's positioning of a US revolutionary tradition against the supposed trap of an exquisitely French "social ques tion." It also distances the persistence of these references among practitioners of embryos of dual power in the United States-not least the Black Panther Party, whose Ten-Point Program ALBERTO TOSCANO concludes with an acute detournement of the Declaration of Independence:

When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw offsuch govern ment, and to provide new guards fo r their fu ture security.

There is an even stronger opposition in Jameson-and I would argue a salutary one-to the frontier anarcho-communism ( contam inated with settler-colonialism) that serves as the political uncon scious of much of the US extreme left, and which can be traced back not so much to the militia ideal that is most active on fringes of the white supremacist right, but to that whole host of experi ments, often promoted by the escapees of the failed European revolutions of the nineteenth century, but also permeated by the sectarian exuberance of American Christianity, which we find inventoried in Charles Nordhoff's classicvolume The Communistic Societies of the Un ited States.

16.

Though it is a utopia that tries to refunction against political theory one of the key notions around which Marxists have tried to invent a sui generis Marxist politics (one breaking with political theory or philosophy as classically construed, by posing the very problem of a "non-state state"), the heart of Jameson's proposal is evidently not strategic in any customary understanding of that term. The bold attempt to refashion a Fourierism fo r our time, largely autonomous from the willfully paradoxical hypothesis of a dual-power army, shows that the core of this "therapeutic" utopia is cultural revolution, a theme that punctuates Jameson's work but is here encapsulated in the idea of the "programming AFTER OCTOBER, BEFORE FEBRUARY 239 and retransformation of subjects trained in one society fo r fu nc tioning in a different one." The terms-like the long quote fr om Trotsky's bleak directives on militarization, which in turn hark back to Engels's bluntly "realist" "On Authority"-are precisely selected to elicit a libertarian reaction that Jameson rightly connects, in the US context, to the deep tendrils that anticommu nist discourse has projected into the very mental habits of progres sives. We can extract fr om this essay a salutary antidote to what has almost become common sense in contemporary far-left discourse, to wit, that today's struggles, all the everyday ruptures, all the cracks in capitalism, are already presaging the sloughing offof the whole integument of alienated life. We might thus wish to balance the consoling notion that "we are the change we were waiting fo r" with Franco Fortini's poetic counsel: "Among the enemies' names I write your own too."29 Whether because of a (partially justified) horror of the specter of the state or a kind of ontological optimism about the human condition (which Jameson nicely punctures), today's "communisms" (of the commons, communization, or the commune) largely reject this very prob lem, that of what we could call an anthropological transition. In the end Jameson has refunctioned the strategic singularity of dual power into a speculative tool to pose this very question, repressed along with the Stalinist nightmare of the New Man (but also the Fanonian discourse of a new humanity). This is a vital contribu tion fo r which no amount of pseudo-iconoclastic invocations of communism as the imageless movement of the destruction of the status quo can substitute-for the destruction of the status quo will also need to be the destruction, the "programming and retransformation," of ourselves, of our own status.

29 Franco Fortini, "Translating Brecht," trans. Michael Hamburger, in Poems, Todmorden: Arc, 1978. ALBERTO TOSCANO

17.

I can't exhaust the wealth of speculative suggestions in Jameson's piece-from the tantalizing invention of the Psychoanalytic Placement Bureau to the problematic bracketing of the self management of producers (surely not an insignificant question given the vastness of today's global proletariat)-but, to conclude, I will touch on two of its features that I think deserve fu rther ... speculation. The first is the theme of a "utopia of the double life." Here I think Jameson is right to eschew the fu sional imaginaries that would see freedom and necessity merge into a seamless social ization of play. Not only should a utopia for today fu lly assume and mobilize negativity (as the theme of "envy" hammers home), it should also attend to what we may term, echoing Marcuse, necessary as opposed to surplus alienation. Yet the double life needs to take into account the tragic, shattering duality that has often accompanied revolutionary efforts, none perhaps more so than the Bolshevik one. As Robert Linhart showed in his incisive Lenin, the Peasants and Taylor, the political pedagogy and emanci pation of workers qua administrators of the new state went hand in hand in Lenin and Trotsky's position with an exceptional, extreme regimentation of production. How would the double life not revive the punishing schizophrenia where the worker is politically (or libidinally) liberated only to be productively shackled (no matter fo r how few hours) by an agency that speaks in his or her name? No Leninist "habit" is going to happily square this circle, nor answer the psycho-political question of the persistence of the state, of its transcendence not only as an institution but as a super-egoic entity in the transitional period. I fear that Jameson's animus against politics and the political-despite serving as a healthy bending of the stick-might make it difficult indeed to pose these questions, or to address the fact that a thinking of transition, as Lenin himself showed in coining this weird and unstable "meta phor" of dual power, demands the invention of a communist AFTER OCTOBER, BEFORE FEBRUARY politics that, like dual power itself, must be asymmetrical fr om its bourgeois counterpart. Such an invention can, I think, take inspi ration, and this is my second point, from a theme that pervades "An American Utopia," and this is Jameson's attempt to imagine various modalities fo r dis activating political (and we could say sovereign) power, linked to his attention to the enduring need fo r fetishes (or in Badiou's parlance, ideas) even "aft er" the transition. Our anthropology of transition will need to face not just the bond of the state with fear, but another Hobbesian theme, the persis tence ofpolitics as a desire fordo mination and a related drive toward conflict. Will this require politics in its classical acceptation to continue in the mode of the "as if"? Doesn't this slip toward a cynical reason that is hardly conducive to the efficacyof these ritu als and fetishes? The horizon of Jameson's utopia would thus be not that of a constituent power (which his objections to the US Constitution make clear) but, to echo Giorgio Agamben's most recent investigations, that of a destituent power, where what is to be destituted, hollowed out, sapped, is politics itself. I would argue however-and here a reading of Agamben is instructive-that destitution is not just an antipolitical but an antistrategic concept, a messianic one. In order to retain the fecund tension between the utopian and the strategic that traverses Jameson's American utopia, I think, to borrow fr om Zavaleta Mercado's Elpoder dual one last time, that what we need to turn our speculative and practi cal attentions toward is fo rging a disorgani'{_ingpower, a power to disorganize not just the institutions of the capitalist state but, as Jameson rightly notes, the manner in which they pervade the very structure of our desires, including our desires fo r revolution-or the lack thereof.

Utopian Therapy: Work, Nonwork, and the Political Imagination

Ka thi Weeks

Fredric Jameson's "An American Utopia" is a meditation on what the Marxist tradition calls the problem of the transition, or more specifically theeventual transition to what some continue to name communism. Refusing more familiar templates fo r change, includ ing the enclave, the uprising, reform, and revolution, Jameson settles instead on the model of dual power. He nominates the army fo r that position, the parallel institution with the potential to serve as the organizational vehicle fo r the transition beyond capitalism. There are two parts to the exercise: first, a practical proposal fo r universal military conscription; this is then converted into the material base fo r a utopian vision of a new society upon which collective and individual freedom can flourish. But the army? As part of a utopian vision? "Military democ racy" sounds more like a contribution to a popular game played to pass the time on long road trips-alongside "jumbo shrimp" and "vacation Bible school"-than a description of a better future. I am surely not the only reader to findthis disconcerting. My imme diate reactions, although no doubt predictable objections fr om a 244 KATH I WEEKS feminist political theorist, are probably not uncommon. The first stems fr om my difficulty imagining a gender-neutral military, that is, a military culture and organization that is somehow shorn of its long historical entanglements with certain iconic constructions of sexual difference. One need not resort to essentialist metaphysics to recognize the gendering of the institution. Given the weight of this gendered history, the universalization of conscription seems in itself inadequate to break the bonds that have knit together models of militarized masculinity with masculinist militarization. The absence of politics is my other stumbling block to thinking along this utopian trajectory. Here I refer not to politics as the art and power of the state, as Jameson defines it, but politics as processes of collective decision-making and sites fo r the mediation of social antagonism; politics in this sense refers to venues where conflicts are staged and the processes by which relations of cooperation are fo rged. The figure of the army I think fu nctions to deflect these questions about its internal structures and relational dynamics because it is equated with the very essence of order: because organization, especially hierarchical organization, is considered somehow inherent to or definitive of the institution. As a gendered machine fo r the production of leaders and subordinates, it is diffi cult fo r me to imagine the army, even a universal army, one that is itself transformed over time, as capable of coexisting with, let alone as a school for, the development of democratic capacities and egalitarian values.

Utopian hermeneutics

There are, however, many more promising points of the proposal to consider, as well as more fruitful ways to approach the points addressed above. To see beyond these initial objections and recog nize the potential power of Jameson's thought experiment, it helps to situate it in relationship to his longstanding interest in utopia. In UTOPIAN THERAPY 245 contrast to others in the Marxist tradition-occasionally including Marx himself-who refer to the utopian with disdain, Jameson approaches it as a richly complex and continually relevant fo rm of praxis. In a departure fr om more conventional views of utopian literature as representations of alternatives, Jameson has long emphasized the way they operate as forms of critique. His signa ture contribution to utopian studies involves a shift in fo cus fr om the positive content of a utopian vision to its negative fu nction of producing an estrangement fr om and neutralization of the present order of things. From this angle, even the failures of speculative thinking can be effective as critical tools fo r the present. In his most famous fo rmulation of this thesis, Jameson advances the marvelously provocative claim that the "deepest vocation" of utopias "is to bring home, in local and determinate ways, and with a fullness of concrete detail, our constitutional inability to imagine utopia itself, and this, not owing to any individual failure of imagi nation but as the result of the systemic, cultural, and ideological closure of which we are all in one way or another prisoners."1 One could read "An American Utopia" as a dramatic departure fr om this earlier approach. Here Jameson offers a concrete politi cal proposal fo llowed by the outline of a substantive alternative. In a seeming reversal of his previous commitments, content takes precedence over form; inspiration displaces critique. Whereas he had once memorably claimed that "utopia as a fo rm is not the representation of radical alternatives; it is rather simply the imper ative to imagine them,"2 in the recent text he wonders if "perhaps, then, the task of utopianism today is rather to propose more

Fredric Jameson, "Progress versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?" Science Fiction Studies 9(2), 1982, 153. 2 Fredric Jameson, '"If I Find One Good City I Will Spare the Man': Realism and Utopia in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy," in Learning from Other Wo rlds: Estrangement, Cognition, and the Politics of Science Fiction and Utopia, ed. Patrick Parrinder, Durham: Duke University Press, 2001, 231. KATH I WEEKS elaborated versions of an alternate social system than simply to argue the need for one." But I think that would be to overstate the shift in direction. In "An American Utopia" Jameson also affirms the critical function of utopian thinking and the efficacies of the fo rm itself. Here too he insists that the fundamental fu nction of utopias is to revive a sense of the fu ture, which requires taking aim at the fo rces that prevent us fr om venturing out from the comfort ingly familiar confines of the present. Thus "utopianism is at one with this therapy of the anti-utopian," and, for this dual task, form and content must operate both together and in tandem such that fo rm can still be approached also as its own content. To put it another way, "An American Utopia" is best read not quite, or not only, literally. To borrow fr om an earlier, often cited critique that Jameson has leveled, when we approach utopias only in terms of their literal content, "there results an impoverishment which is due to the reduction of the multiple levels of the Utopian idea to the single, relatively abstract field of social planning."3 Rather than merely a series of arguments to evaluate, Jameson also presents the exercise as something to undergo, a fo rm of polit ical and ideological therapy. Let me offer two quick examples of this kind of fo rmal effectivity of a text that exceeds its content. Although I remain more hopeful about the political utility of some of those mechanisms of transition that Jameson was willing to discard, the model of dual power and the proposal fo r a universal army both pose a provocative challenge to certain left dispositions. First, as an exercise in thinking the transition, the strategy of dual power-irrespective of the model's substantive specificities obliges us to think on a larger social scale and along a longer temporal trajectory than most seem willing to entertain these days. With its goal of fundamental and systemic change, the model fo rces us to scale up a political imagination more accustomed to

3 Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectic Th eories of Literature, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971, 145-6. UTOPIAN THERAPY 247 partial and immediate reform so that it can operate on the level of the social totality, with its network of institutions and ecosystem of structures and subjectivities; it compels us to expand our historical capacity fu rther into the future so that we can think along the longer timeframe necessary fo r radical transformation and contem plate a transition that is still only a transition to another transition. In these ways, Jameson's program of dual power, regardless of its specific qualities, usefully exposes at least two fo rms of what he refers to elsewhere as our "difficulties in thinking quantity positively. "4 The proposal fo r the universal army poses a second set of chal lenges fo r the typical reader. Jameson is well aware of the reac tions his scheme can trigger: the horror that the prospect of the existing military assuming power can inspire. To nominate the army fo r this revolutionary position is to throw down the gauntlet to the anti-institutional left, to force its resistances out into the open where they can be critically examined. ·More specifically, in order to begin to consider the army as a revolutionary fo rm, we must first confront any lingering attachments we might have to a model of revolutionary transition as complete rupture, whereby the future is imagined to spring fo rth fr om the ashes of which it never bears the stain. Like Marx and Engels in the Manifesto, the path to Jameson's utopian future passes through what is for many of us an exemplar of the dystopian present. The analysis thus models in exceptionally unambiguous terms a rigorously imma nent logic of transitional thinking; whatever one might think of the universal army, one of the things Jameson's defense does quite effectively is to drive to the surface and fo rce us to confront any longings we might harbor fo r the purity of clean breaks and

4 Fredric Jameson, "Utopia as Method, or, the Uses of the Future," in Utopia/Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility, ed. Michael D. Gordin, Helen Tilley, and Gvan Prakash, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010, 29. KATH I WEEKS aversions we might hold fo r the messiness of complex complicities and protracted struggles. In this respect, the exercise bears some kinship to a number of notable precedents, including Marx's inter est in the joint-stock company as the potential seed or sign of a postcapitalist future; Jameson's earlier speculations about the utopian lessons of Walmart; and Donna Haraway's affirmationof the cyborg as at once the product of militarized technoscience and a way to conceive a better future.5 By designating the army as a means by which to build a differentfu ture, Jameson is clearly, dare I say even didactically, playing the cards we were dealt.

Work Unbound

This brings me to one of the most intriguing elements of "An American Utopia" and the fo cus of the remainder of the essay: namely, the place ofwork in this template of a possible fu ture. The vision is organized around a rough distinction between base and superstructure that maps onto divisions between economy and culture, necessity and freedom, and work and leisure. The first realm designated by these oppositions is narrowly delimited so as to create the conditions for the sphere of life with which it is paired to expand and flourish. By far the most appealing and-to borrow Jameson's term-therapeutic element of this schema is the strict separation that he maintains between work and nonwork. Work is reduced to the equivalent of a few hours a day of necessary social reproduction, performed in work clothes and in teams, and while he insists-unnecessarily, it seems to me-on full employment, a generous guaranteed wage weakens the coercive fo rce of the link

5 Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, trans. David Fernbach, London: Penguin, 1981; Jameson, "Utopia as Method"; Donna Haraway, "A Manifesto fo r Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s," Socialist Review, 80 1985, 65-107. UTOPIAN THERAPY 249 between work and income with which we are now fo rced to contend. Wo rk is hardly glorified in this account, relegated as it is to "ordinary drudgery, the necessary tasks, and the like." Instead of dressing it up and calling it fr eedom, as in so many utopian dreams of nonalienated labor, Jameson names it (mere) work, reduces the hours of its operatives, and dresses them down in uniforms.6 By these means, the borders around the work of economic (re)production are tightly drawn to make ample room fo r a vision of free-unscripted and unaccountable-time to develop on its basis. This carefully circumscribed vision of work-confined to shorter shifts and restricted to the execution of necessary tasks can serve as an effective counter to and treatment fo r the present hegemony of work and its values. By calling out and into question the present unbounded and overvalued status of work, this utopia of a double life, of work and nonwork strictly cordoned offfr om one another, forces us to imagine freedom not in work but in the spaces and times outside work. This careful partitioning of base and superstructure, which Jameson likens in some respects to the older separation between church and state, fu nctions like a secu larizing tonic to help wean us of our almost religious devotion to the metaphysics of labor and the productivist gospel of work. To appreciate the value of this dimension of Jameson's exercise in utopian thinking, one must grasp the enormity of the current problem it serves to redress. Wo rk has come to so dominate our existence that we have trouble imagining a life not subordinated to it. The utopia of the double life that Jameson depicts offers both a diagnosis of and a remedy for our addiction to work, our rever ence for its values, and our inability to imagine a life outside it. There are a number of reasons why it is difficultboth to put work

6 To fans of utopian fiction: in its conception of work, both in itself and in relation to leisure, "An American Utopia" sides more with Team Bellamy than Team Morris. KATH I WEEKS in its place and to imagine nonwork as something other than more work. The general obstacle to thinking beyond work could be described in Marxist terms as the move from the fo rmal to the real subsumption of reproduction into production, or of life into work. The traditional division between economy and society is made ever more tenuous as the chief warrant of social institutions like the family, school, army, prison, and clinic becomes reduced to the production or restoration of employability. As cultures and soci alities are absorbed into economic production as both inputs and outputs, the borders between work and nonwork times, spaces, relations, and activities become ever more blurred, giving work free rein to define our existence. For one minor but telling symp tom of the subsumption of life into work: the dubious concept of "work/life balance" is being replaced in some human-resource management circles with the more ominous goal of "work/life integration. "7 Another obstacle to imagining the contents of work and the relationship between work and nonwork differentlyis the contem porary hegemony of the work ethic. In elevating work over other activities as highest calling and moral duty, as an end in itself and rightful center of our identities and socialities, the work ethic is a kind of glue that fastens us to the status quo, something that synchronizes so many of our desires fo r individual achievement and social contribution-desires fo r personal growth and social solidarity-to the paltry terms of the wage relation. The work ethic binds us to the job by hailing us not only as desiring consum ers but, perhaps more important, as would-be producers, as subjects too often willing to serve capital's purposes by living fo r and through work. The hegemony of this ethos of work extends broadly across the social fabric and bores deeply into the individual psyche. The

7 Matt Richtel, "Housecleaning, then Dinner? Silicon Valley Perks Come Home," Ne w Yo rk Times, October 19, 2012. UTOPIAN THERAPY ethical mandate to dedicate our lives to work is fundamental to the social contract; it is the essence of what we owe one another, the major currency of social reciprocity. The liability to labor becomes the single most significantmeasure of a worthy citizen; indeed, the productive citizen has somehow become the moral equivalent of the socially responsible and responsive citizen. The steadfast commitment to work and principled commitment to productivity that the work ethic preaches stand today as fu ndamental mecha nisms of social articulation, the connective tissues of the social order. This ethic of work penetrates deeply into the fibers of our being. Indeed, neoliberal subjectivities are defined by their entrepreneur ial enthusiasm fo r work and their fidelity to the productivist ethos. Melissa Gregg describes one consequence of this as the ever more intimate relationship that many workers have to work and the romance narratives they use to describe their love for and devo tion to it. 8 Having internalized the value of efficiency, these neoliberal worker-subjects find pleasure and confirmation above all in the feeling of productivity.9 This is not a collective pleasure, or pleasure in the collective. Rather, it is a deeply individualized and individualizing ethic of work, in accordance with, to borrow Nietzsche 's quietly snide description, "virtue has come to consist in doing something in a shorter time than another person."10 The Krisis-Group's "Manifesto against Labor" explains the �egemony of work values this way: whenever we want to signal the serious ness and value of an activity, they observe, we add the word work to it; and the list they provide includes some of our most intimate activities, including dream work, relationship work, and grieving

8 Melissa Gregg, Wo rk 's In timacy, Cambridge: Polity, 2011. 9 Melissa Gregg, "Getting Things Done: Productivity, Self Management, and the Order of Things," in Ne tworked Aff ect, ed. Ken Hillis, Susanna Paasonen and Michael Petit, Boston: MIT Press, 2015, 187-202. 10 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Vintage Books, 1974, 259. KATHI WEEKS work. But it is not just laudable activity that merits the label of work; activity itself becomes understood through the rubric of work and is shaped by its priorities. "As soon our contemporary rises from the TV chair," they write, "every action is transformed into an act similar to labour."11 Again, these values go deep, struc turing not only our conscious but also our unconscious lives. In one particularly telling example, Rob Lucas recounts in a recent essay how, as an IT worker, he fo und himself dreaming in code. It was not that he dreamt about the job; rather, he dreamt within its rationale. "It is as if," he reports, "the repetitive thought patterns and the particular logic I employ when going about my work are becoming hardwired; are becoming the default logic that I use to think with."12 This is "alienation entirely swallowing that which it alienates," alienation that penetrates the depths of subjectivity. It is, among other things, work's intimacy-to borrow Gregg's term-that allows it to burrow so deeply into our minds where it can impede the achievement of critical distance and colonize the political imaginary. The Krisis-Group describes the consequences of this intimate relationship to work in eloquent terms:

After centuries of domestication, the modern human being can not even imagine a life without labour. As a social imperative, labour not only dominates the sphere of the economy in the narrow sense, but also pervades social existence as a whole, creeping into every

day life and deep under the skin of everybody. 13

As a result, to adapt a claim that Jameson, among others, has recounted about how it is easier to imagine the end of the world

II Krisis-Group, "Manifesto against Labour," I999, www.krisis. org/ I 999 I manifesto-against-labour. 12 Rob Lucas, "Dreaming in Code," New LeftReview 62, 2010, 125. I3 Krisis-Group, "Manifesto against Labour." UTOPIAN THERAPY 253 than the end of capitalism, at this point it may be easier to imagine the end of capitalism than to imagine the end of work.

Failed Visions of Nonwork

Given the breadth and depth of our attachments to work, the rela tionships that hinge upon it, and the identities we are encouraged to invent and invest there, it is no easy task to envision how, to use one of Jameson's fo rmulations, we might "disintoxicate ourselves fr om the older system's powerful addictions." The utopia of the double life, the larger part of which exists free of work, poses a compelling critique of and treatment for those who suffer today fr om the ever more capacious and intimate world of work. But that said, I think it remains more powerful as a critical pedagogy for the present subsumption of life into work than an inspiring vision of a substantive alternative to it, a conclusion that simply places this aspect of "An American Utopia" firmly within the tradition of Jameson's larger utopian oeuvre. If that is the case, then the prob lem of imagining the positive content of nonwork continues unre solved. But how can we dream outside the code of work when work and its values know no bounds? For fu rther evidence of the profound obstacles we face in thinking differently about work, I want to turn briefly to another archive, one comprised of deficient attempts to conceive life beyond work. This very partial chronicle of the failed imagination of nonwork will be organized around three headings.14 The first of these conceives nonwork through an oppositional logic of imagination such that, if work is productive activity, nonwork is understood as unproductive. This is perhaps most clear when the only imagined existence of nonwork is defined by sloth, as in the frequently

14 The discussion expands on an argument I outlined in an earlier essay: Kathi Weeks, "Imagining Non-Work," Social Text Periscope, March 28, 2013. 254 KATH I WEEKS voiced fear that if it were not fo r work there would be no reason to get out of bed or offthe couch. If activity itself is so strictly identi fied with and reduced to work, then nonwork is defined by its absence as pure indolence. I think this same logic of imagination animates Franco Berardi's recent defense of a mode of "radical passivity" to oppose the neoliberal mandate of "relentless produc tivity" and Ivor Southwood's endorsement of the estranging capacity of critical negativity as an antidote to a culture of compul sory positivity. 15 Jonathan Crary's claim in his book 24/7 that sleep can both pose a limit to capitalism as well as the template of an alternative also fits within this general rubric. As in the previ ously cited examples, one reason Crary likes sleep is that value cannot be extracted from it. But more promising are two additional qualities of sleep that he develops. One is his argument that while we think of sleep as a private and individual experience, it is more accurately characterized as "one of the few remaining experiences where we abandon ourselves to the care of others," a state of vulnerability and hence of dependence on others and even a temporary "release fr om individuation."16 The second virtue of sleep as part of an alternative imaginary is the way that the cate gory is, fo r Crary, inclusive of dreaming in both its fo rms. In contrast to the ways that the 24/7 temporality of late capitalism represents for him the triumph of the present over both the past and the fu ture, night dreams allow us to access the past and daydreams to entertain the possibility of better fu tures. Lucas's less hopeful story about dreaming in the code of work notwith standing, Crary offers an intriguing account of what sleep is and what it can do. Nonetheless, I would still maintain that sleep-as

15 Franco "Bifo" Berardi, Aft er the Future, ed. Gary Genesko and Nicholas Thoburn, Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2011, 138; lvor Southwood, No n-Stop Inertia, Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 201 1, 84, 88. 16 Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the End of Sleep, London: Verso, 2013, 25, 126. UTOPIAN TH ERAPY 255 the opposite of active wakefulness and paradigm of nonproductiv ity and as, despite Crary's claim to the contrary, something posited as a natural outside to capitalist culture-remains more of a reac tive reversal of the work society than a way to imagine a future beyond it. In a second formulation, nonwork is conceived not as work's flip side but as its mirror image, as when it is described in terms of doing the same things fo r the same long hours we now do at the job or at home, but under different conditions: that is, time fo r industriouscreativi ty. This nonwork imaginary is governed not by an oppositional logic but by a continuist one. Here I am thinking in particular about any number of earnest efforts on the left to distance nonwork fr om both the sin of sloth and the degrading amusements of consumption. Work as it is transformed under communism, authors like Jon Elster and Michael Walzer have assured us, will involve goal-oriented, rule-governed, purposive action, not passive, trivial, hedonistic pastimes and indulgences.17 So the limitation of this second notion of nonwork-as creative industry-is that it is often described in terms of the kind of single minded fo cus, self-discipline, and worthy outcomes that the work ethic celebrates as the essence of work. Thus in some Marxist accounts, the achievement of nonexploited and unalienated labor is more a matter of changing the relations of production than the labor process itself and the role of work in our lives. In that case, its vision of "not working as we now know it" looks very much like work as we know it only too well. I would include in this second category of industrious creativity another notable alterna tive to work, namely play, at least insofar as it is often offered up as

17 Jon Elster, "Self-Realisation in Wo rk and Politics: The Marxist Conception of the Good Life," in Alternatives to Capitalism, ed. Jon Elster and Karl Ove Moene, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, 127-58; Michael Walzer, "A Day in the Life of a Socialist Citizen," in Radical Principles: Reflections of an Unreconstructed Democrat, New York: Basic Books, 1980, 128-38. KATH I WEEKS yet another stand-in fo r rule-bound and fruitful creattvtty. Although it may have fu nctioned as an Other to the model of industrial work, today the way that play-even the sad copy of it marketed to employers by "funsultants"-has been incorporated into managerial regimes and retooled as part of work undermines its ability to generate an alternative imaginary. Today it is quite routine to see employers of (presumably) high-value employees encouraging them to work hard but play harder as a way to stimu late, and legitimate their own harnessing of, their employees' crea tive powers. In these respects, play is more continuous with the way work is conceived today than transformative of it. A third set of attempts to conceive nonwork are limited because of the way they mistake the inside for the outside: that is, because what they offer as a standpoint outside the existing world of work remains firmly ensconced within it. Consumption, typically posed as a negative alternative to production, as in the often repeated warning that with more time offwork we will fill our time with shopping, thus descending fu rther into commodity fetishism, fits within this rubric: though they are imagined here as an opposition, production and consumption are only two sides of the same system. What Marx characterizes as the submerging of our passions and activities in greed is central to the construction of the subject as worker. 18 Current needs fo r consumer gratification are the kinds of needs that, in his words, "lead the flyto the gluepot," needs that are functional to and complicit with the very system that demands that we work our lives away in order to live.19 In this third group we could also include leisure time, traditionally understood as time to recover fr om or prepare fo r work. This connection to work is particularly clear in the notion of the vacation, constructed as a reward fo r, and a way to renew, waged workers and family

18 Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan, New York: International Publishers, 1964, 150. 19 Ibid., 148. UTOPIAN THERAPY 257 members by allowing them to escape both job and home fo r a time. This nonwork fo r the sake of work includes the leisure time to upgrade our labor, as in the nineteenth-century call fo r more "vigorous leisure time" for the working class to cultivate the moral virtues, or acknowledgment in the twenty-first century that work ers need time to grow their networks or colleague sets and work on their employability.20 Like consumption, leisure in this traditional sense functions to reproduce the existing systems of economic production and subject construction. Finally, those who propose family time as an alternative to work time are also imagining an outside that is inside, as if the institution of the family was not a mechanism fo r the organization and distribution of the reproduc tive work necessary fo r productive work; as if the family did not serve as a supplement to the income allocation function of work; as if the ideology of the family was not intimately bound up with the ascetic ideal of the work ethic; as if, in short, the home was not a place of work. In these examples the model of nonwork is already folded into work. To summarize: in the first case nonwork is cast as unproductive, in the second it is posed as differentlyproductive , and in the third it is figuredas reproductive of the subject as a worker. In one nonwork is the other of work; in the second it is its twin; and in the third it is work's complement. The first employs an oppositional logic of imagination, the second a continuist one, and the third an imagina tion that is drawn from what it seeks to overcome. Although they may appear to be categories of nonwork, they fail to escape the

20 On nonwork fo r the sake of work, see Bob Black, "The Abolition of Wo rk," in Reinventing Anarchy, Again, ed. Howard J. Ehrlich, Oakland CA: AK Press, 1996, 237. For a critical account of the nineteenth-century call fo r productive leisure time activities, see Benjamin Hunnicutt, Free Time: The Forgotten American Dream, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013. For an uncritical contribution to the more recent discourse about leisure-time networking, see Tom Peters, "The Brand Called You," Fast Company 10, 1997, 83-94. KATH I WEEKS imaginary of productivity or the models of the subject that would deliver it. My point is that because these notions of work's refusal are still under the sway of its ethics, the models of nonwork they generate are too locked within the orbit of work as we now know it to push us very far beyond its gravity. To return again to Jameson's earlier thesis, there is a good case to be made that these failures of imagination are themselves instructive. Our encounter with the failed political imagination, he claims, can help us better to recognize the true extent of our affec tive attachments to, and ideological complicity within, the present. To borrow this insight fo r my purposes here, it may be that the failure of our imagination of nonwork can help to deepen our crit ical understanding of work and provide an opportunity to confront not only our incapacity for imagining nonwork, but also our fear of and resistance to the utopian imagination of a postwork fu ture, a fear that the specters of individual idleness and collective indisci pline are especially adept at generating. I am more sympathetic to that response to the dilemma of imag ining nonwork than I am to the idea that our problems could be overcome with the aid of empirical examples, glimpses of existing practices that might help us to imagine the possibilities of nonwork time in more concrete terms. Because the difficulties in imagining beyond work as we know it are not only due to the ways we are overwhelmed by the present practical, ideological, and subjective demands of work; we are also hampered in locating promising examples of nonwork by a lack of knowledge of the existing world of employment. Our cognitive mappings of the work society are woefully incapable of orienting us. We may know more than we want to about our own jobs, but our knowledge of the experience and conditions of other jobs is severely limited. The abstraction of labor that fo lds the heterogeneity of concrete labor into labor in general renders us inattentive to the specific qualities of different fo rms of work. The work ethic teaches us to value any job at any wage; any employment is considered productive employment and UTOPIAN THERAPY 259

a sign of one's moral rectitude. This is why government job creation initiatives rarely mention what kinds of jobs will be created. In the absence of viable diagrams of the work society, our navigable coordinates are reduced to the narrow range of jobs of which we have first- or secondhand knowledge, a tiny subset of the larger pool of employment that is typically reserved fo r one's own class fr action. We can hardly imagine a future beyond something we presently know so little about. The possibility of coming up with living examples of nonwork is also hindered by the way history can often obscure our view of the present. We are also haunted by work's past, something that is revealed in the backward-looking and nostalgic content of many of the examples that have been offered as representatives of the larger world of work. Consider the famous Marxist example of the description of a day under communism spent hunting in the morn ing, fishing in the afternoon, rearing cattle in the evening, and criticizing after dinner. Terrell Carver claims that the original draft of this passage in the German Ideology suggests that Engels wrote the section and then Marx inserted some additions designed to flag it as a sarcastic sendup of the bygone pastoral visions advanced by the utopian socialists.21 Outdated examples persist in the later industrial period, when images of artisanal and crafts labor were still used to represent workers, and today under post-Fordism, when the figure of the Fordist company man is still often evoked when work is addressed or when the newspaper help-wanted ads are offered as the way fo r the chronically unemployed and under employed to better themselves. In light of these obstacles to envisaging a radically new relation ship to work and to imagining nonwork on a different model, rather than searching fo r nonwork in the past or the present, it is perhaps more helpful to tether our imagination of it to the fu ture

21 Terrell Carver, Th e Postmodern Marx, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998, 106. 260 KATH I WEEKS so that we conceive it not as something to recover or defend but rather to invent. But this brings us face to face with what is perhaps the greatest obstacle to postwork speculation: the fear of our own extinction as individuals. J arneson has written about this else where, describing this particular fear of utopia as the fear of becoming otherwise: "a thoroughgoing anxiety in the face of everything we stand to lose in the course of so momentous a trans fo rmation that-even in the imagination-it can be thought to leave little intact of current passions, habits, practices, and values."22 We would not survive a radical transformation of the conditions of our own construction as subjects. This fo rm of anti utopian resistance sterns fr om a desire fo r self-preservation in the most literal sense, as the commitment to the continuation of our individual selves. Given the intimate relationship to work and its values that we are today expected to forge, the prospect of a post work society can generate some particularly strong resistance along these lines.

Postwork Therapies

"We hammer away at anti-utopianism not with arguments," Jameson maintains, "but with therapy: every utopia today must be a psychotherapy of anti-utopian fears and draw them out into the light of day, where the sad passions like blinded snakes writhe and twist in the open air." This final section draws on Jameson's larger project, including this most recent installment, to construct another exercise in utopian envisioning. This far less practically minded exercise is designed, following Jameson's instructions, as therapy for anti-utopian fear and anxiety. This course of treatment fo cuses in particular on exposing and indulging our anxiety about the

22 Fredric Jameson, Th e Seeds of Time, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, 60. UTOPIAN THERAPY prospect of a future that could not sustain us as individuals, the fe ar of becoming undone as a subject. Although the therapeutic capacity of utopian thinking derives fr om the intermixture of the critical and inspirational qualities of both the utopian fo rm and its substantive content, in keeping with the interpretive practices employed to read "An American Utopia," I will be less concerned with the literal representation of utopian content than with the potential effects of the fo rm that the exercise takes. To construct this contribution to postwork speculation, I will return to the Marxist tradition and briefly explore two of its utopian texts, one from the early Marx and the other by second-wave feminist Shulamith Firestone. In a section of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 with the title "The Meaning of Human Requirements," Marx offers some suggestive ideas about how we might begin to think about how to spend nonwork time and produce postwork selves. He does this by casting nonwork not as a time within which we can meet our existing needs, but in relation to the possibility of new needs. In his indictment of bourgeois political economy, Marx describes it as a moral doctrine parading as if it were value-free science, a "science of asceticism" that shapes the worker in accord ance with its own moral ideal: "Self-denial, the denial oflife and of all human needs, is its cardinal doctrine."23 This is how these political economists make workers out of human beings: by reduc ing our needs-from needs fo r fo od and shelter, to needs fo r activ ity, pleasure, and sociality-to a specific functional minimum. Marx's characterization of who we become as workers in this model of the work society includes references to the impoverish ment of our senses and "a dulled capacity for pleasure."24 Our affective capacities and modes of sociality are equally diminished, since if we "want to be economical," we should spare ourselves

23 Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, 95. 24 Ibid., 94. KATHI WEEKS

"all sharing of general interest, all sympathy, all trust, etc.," leav ing self-interest fr ee rein. Becoming an economic subject means managing what today is referred to as our employability: accord ing to this economic ethic, "you must make everything that is yours saleable, i.e., useful."25 By this estimation the problem is not that we need and want too much, as those who preach the ethics of hard work and decry our "entitlement attitudes" would have it, but that we have too few needs and too little desire. It is worth noting here that Marx's critique in this text is not an example of the usual ascetic diatribe against the pleasures of consumption. Consider his mocking description of the teachings by which we are made into the ethical subjects of a capitalist work society:

The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the thea tre, the dance hall, the public-house; the less you think, love, theo

rize, sing, paint, fe nce etc., the more you save-the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour-your capital.26

In this way, multiple modes of doing, being, and communing are subordinated to having: as Marx summarizes this advice, "the less you are, the more you have."27 But note that the kinds of things we are counseled to minimize, which he lists in that passage, are not necessarily what we would characterize as unproductive indo lence, or productive creativity, or reproductive leisure (to recall my three earlier examples of the failed imagination of nonwork). Rather, by fr aming his critical analysis in terms of our needs their qualities and quantities, their expansion and contraction-he sidesteps the question of whether such activities or experiences are

25 Ibid., 96. 26 Ibid., 95-6. n rbid. UTOPIAN THERAPY productive or unproductive and poses the problem on an ontologi cal register, emphasizing instead the question of what their impact on our subjectivity might be, on who it is we are encouraged-and able-to become. I want to emphasize that it is not precisely the content of nonpro ductive and nonreproductive pastimes, which the political econo mists warn us against and Marx affirms, that I want to take away fr om this reading. (Perhaps fencing offers a case in point.) In addi tion to the above list, Marx offersone more glimpse of an alterna tive later in the section, in the fo rm of an example of how we might create new needs. There he describes how, as proletarian activists come together as workers to do political work, a different mode of being emerges as a new "need fo r society" develops-a need for a fo rm of sociality quite different fr om that orchestrated through the capitalist division of labor and even different than the kind of sociality that initially brought them together as workers in their opposition to capitalism. As they come together, their process, their means or methods of organizing-he lists "company, asso ciation, and conversation"-become ends in themselves.28 In contrast to the ethical subject constituted in relation to the ascetic ideals of "acquisition, work, thrift, sobriety, " we are invited by such examples to think about nonwork on a fu ture trajectory, as an opportunity to cultivate a new wealth of human needs. 29 Just as I drew on Marx to think beyond the empirical example, to conceive nonwork not as content to recover but as possibilities to invent, I want to look to Firestone for an additional point of instruction. I am particularly interested in the final chapter of her iconoclastic masterpiece fr om 1970, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Fe ministRevol ution, wherein Firestone explicitly defends spec ulation about what she mockingly calls "dangerously utopian" proposals and offers,fo r her contribution to that project, a vision

28 Ibid., 99. 29 Ibid., 97. KATH I WEEKS of cybernetic, postfamilial communism. Firestone does not offer anything approaching a blueprint; her deliberately "sketchy" propositions are meant to "stimulate thinking in fresh areas rather than to dictate the action."30 Insisting that we need a "qualitative change in humanity's basic relationships to both its production and its reproduction," she advances two proposals: a guaranteed basic income as a step towards postwork communism and a variety of options fo r postfamilial household formation.31 Here too it is not the examples that interest me most. Like other utopias, this one is both prescient and dated, and it is worth noting that Firestone is at her least provocative when she resorts to an example fr om her own present, a seed she thought could be, or develop into, an alter native to the family: an example that she calls-complete with quotation marks every time she refers to it-" living together." Instead I want to spotlight a third element of her exercise in utopian speculation: a vision of a world beyond gender and sexual identities as we now know them. "The end goal of feminist revolu tion must be," she declares, "not just the elimination of male privi lege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally."32 This particu lar form of feminist anti-identitarianism is now rare in feminist theory, which is another reason to return here to Firestone. While one may or may not find the content of this genderless utopia attractive, and may or may not find instruction in Firestone's deep commitment to her gender together with a call fo r its withering away, the fo rm of the exercise is I think nonetheless important. Even more than Marx, Firestone understood that this radical trans fo rmation of subjectivity was not about us. So as I read them, Marx helps us to think about nonwork along a fu ture trajectory as

30 Shulamith Firestone, Th e Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, New Yo rk: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003, 203. 31 Ibid., 183, 207. 32 Ibid., 11. UTOPIAN THERAPY something to invent over time; Firestone then adds to this the insight that this future of nonwork will not be our future. Thinking the fu ture requires that we think beyond ourselves, within a long enough temporal frame to imagine the extinction of our current structures of desire, subjectivity, and sociality. As part of her affir mation of a postindividual temporality, Firestone also cautions against a prescriptivist politics of personal change, insisting instead on collective and structural rather than individual change. "It is unrealistic," she argues,

to impose theories of what ought to be on a psyche already fu nda mentally organized around specific emotional needs ...We would do much better to concentrate on overthrowing the institutions that have produced this psychical organization, making possible the eventual-if not in our lifetime-fundamental restructuring (or should I say destructuring?) of our psychosexuality.33

We are not the targets of this change, not the subjects of this future, even if we might be among its agents. It is a difficult thingshe asks of us: to think, want, and struggle for a future that will not be our future. On the one hand, to engage in political action requires some longing fo r and imagination of a differentfu ture, one that we might want; on the other hand, we must also appreciate that we will not be, and perhaps could not be, the subjects of that world. This, then, is how the form of the exercise asks us to begin to imagine the contents of a postwork future. Against the economic and emotional asceticism of work ethic, we think about how to cultivate a wealth of needs for care, sociality, pleasure, activity, desire, and affect that exceed the world of work, and that we learn how to be willing to imagine such a fu ture as simultaneously our own and not fo r us.

33 Ibid., 216.

The Seeds of Imagination

Sfav o} Zizek

Contemporary literary and cinema theory has elaborated the notion of the "seed of imagination," the germ out of which the fictional universe of a work of art grows. 1 This fantasmatic core is not simply the basic plot, the figureof a central hero, or any of the similar obvious candidates-it is, as a rule, an element that is unrecognizable in the final product. For example, Henry James's masterpiece The Ambassadors grows out of the idea of an American returning fr om Europe to the United States after he learns that his father has died. The "seed of imagination" of Hitchcock films is usually not even a narrative element but the fo rmal motif of a scene, a shot, or a gesture. Perhaps philosophical revolutions evolve in a similar way: their "seed of imagination," the particular topic or deadlock that triggers the process out of which the revolu tion grows, is as a rule something unrecognizable in the new edifice that results from it. The "seed" of Kant's transcendental turn was his preoccupation with ghosts, his attempt to reject Swedenborg's

See, among others, Kim Jong 11, On the Art of the Cinema, Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2001, 13-23. 268 SLAVOJ ZIZEK theosophy; the seed of Hegel's mature dialectics was English polit ical economy (as Georg Lukacs demonstrated in his Yo ung Hegel). Such "seeds" are sometimes accidental, and indifferent starting points which are aufgehoben ( sublated) can be fo rgotten once the new fo rm of thought is here; sometimes they are crucial and have symptomal value of indicating a "repressed" dimension of a theo retical edifice; sometimes they are both-their contingent origin is their symptomal point. What today's radical left needs are such "seeds of imagination" that would enable it not only to provide a new vision of a Communist society, but also to break out of the terrifying impoverishment of our power of imagination in our late capitalist society. When it was announced that, fr om July till September 2015, "Jade Helm 15"-large military exercises-would take place in the southwestern United States, the news immediately gave rise to a suspicion that the exercises were part of a federal plot to place Texas under martial law, in direct violation of the Constitution. We find all the usual suspects participating in this conspiracy para noia, up to Chuck Norris; the craziest among them is the website All News Pipeline, which linked the exercises to the closure of several Walmart megastores in Texas:

Will these massive stores soon be used as "food distribution cent ers" and to house the headquarters of invading troops fr om China, here to disarm Americans one by one as promised by Michelle Obama to the Chinese prior to Obama leaving the White House?2

What makes the affairmore ominous is the ambiguous reaction of the leading Texas Republicans. Governor Greg Abbott ordered the Texas National Guard to monitor the exercise, while Senator

2 Stefan Stanford, "Are the Wal-Mart Closings in Jade Helm 15 States a Sign We 've Sold Them the Rope They'll Use to Hang Us with by Shopping at Wal-Mart All These Years?" All Ne ws Pipeline, April 14, 2015, allnewspipeline.com. THE SEEDS OF IMAGINATI ON

Ted Cruz demanded details fr om the Pentagon. How can some thing so openly "irrational" take place? For Ezra Klein, the ulti mate reason is that partisanship is increasingly driven by hatred and fear of the other guy rather than love of your team. Texas conservatives are so much driven by hatred of Obama that they are ready to believe he actually wants to facilitate a Chinese take over of the US Southwest. While the leading Texas Republicans are of course not ready to publicly embrace such crazy conspiracy theories, they nonetheless want to signal their solidarity with the anti-Obama fanatics among their voters.3 How are we to read this weird, paranoiac construct? Its ideo logical investment is clearly ambiguous. In a first approach, we are clearly dealing with the populist distortion of a fully justified distrust of the oppressive state apparatuses. However, one can also read it as the elaboration of a correct insight into an unexpected emancipatory potential in the US Army-the topic of Jameson's essay, debated in the present volume. The fact that such an idea cannot but appear to us as an ominous eccentricity bears witness to the fateful limitation of our ability to imagine alternatives. A recent scientific report describes how fu ture biotechnology could be used to trick a prisoner's mind into thinking they have served a thousand-year sentence. Drugs could be developed to distort pris oners' minds into thinking time was passing more slowly. According to Rebecca Roache,

There are a number of psychoactive drugs that distort people 's sense of time, so you could imagine developing a pill or a liquid that made someone fe el like they were serving a 1,000-year sentence. A second scenario would be to upload human minds to computers to speed up the rate at which the mind works. If the speed-up were a factor of a million, a millennium of thinking would be accomplished

3 Matthew Yglesias, "The Amazing Jade Helm Conspiracy Theory, Explained," Vox, May 6, 2015, vox.com. SLAVOJ ZIZEK

in eight and a half hours. Uploading the mind of a convicted crimi nal and running it a million times fa ster than normal would enable the uploaded criminal to serve a 1,000-year sentence in eight and a half hours. This would, obviously, be much cheaper fo r the taxpayer than extending criminals' lifespans to enable them to serve 1,000 years in real time. 4

An ethical twist is then added to the argumentation:

Is it really OK to lock someone up fo r the best part of the only life they will ever have, or might it be more humane to tinker with their brains and set them fr ee? When we ask that question, the goal isn't simply to imagine a bunch of fu turistic punishments-the goal is to look at today's punishments through the lens of the fu ture.5

But what about the opposite intervention, which would enable us to make love fo r ten minutes and experience it hundreds of years? What about a life whose temporality could be totally manipu lated in both directions, so that one can also make someone expe rience a ten-year prison sentence as something that lasts only ten minutes? How would such temporarily manipulated life look, and how would it be experienced? In short, does imagining the consequences of the manipulability of our perception of time only along the lines of how it could render serving a prison sentence more productive not provide an extreme example of the misery and limitations of our imagination of the fu ture? This limitation is clearly perceptible even when we are dealing with critical dystopias: Jameson is right to emphasize how dystopias that abound in recent blockbuster movies and novels (Elysium,

4 Rhiannon Williams, "Prisoners 'Could Serve 1,000 Year Sentence in Eight Hours,"' Te legraph, March 14, 2014. Incidentally, this was also the plot of a Star Trek: Deep Sp ace Nine episode. 5 Ibid. THE SEEDS OF IMAG INATION

The Hunger Games), although apparently leftist (presenting a postapocalyptic society of extreme class divisions), are unimagi native, monotonous, and also politically wrong. Here is another extreme case of this misery of imagination: the German, pro Zionist anti-Deutsche leftists wrote in one of their programmatic texts that, because of their extreme suffering, when communism arrives and with it the dissolution of national identities, Jews would be allowed to be the last to abandon their national iden tity. Can we even imagine a more perverted line of thought? Its underlying premise is that communism will entail the sacrifice of our most precious features, so that a special favor should be granted to the Jews and they should be allowed to enjoy their ethnic identity a little bit longer. The bleak picture of the total triumph of global capitalism, which immediately appropriates all attempts to subvert it, is itself the product of ideological imagination. It makes us blind fo r the signs of the New that abound in the very heart of global capitalism. For example, in his The Zero Marginal Cost Society, Jeremy Rifkin develops how, with the emerging Internet of Things, we are enter ing the era of nearly free goods and services: the rise of a global Collaborative Commons entails the eclipse of capitalism. There is a paradox at the heart of capitalism that has propelled it to greatness but is now taking it to its death: the inherent entrepreneurial dyna mism of competitive markets that drives productivity up and marginal costs down, enabling businesses to reduce the price of their goods and services in order to win over consumers and market share. (Marginal cost is the cost of producing additional units of a good or service, if fixed costs are not counted.) While economists have always welcomed a reduction in marginal cost, they never anticipated the possibility of a technological revolution that might bring marginal costs to near zero, making goods and services price less, nearly fr ee, abundant, and no longer subject to market fo rces. Now, a fo rmidable new technology infrastructure is emerging with the potential of pushing large segments of economic life to 272 SLAVOJ :ZI:Z:EK near-zero marginal cost in the years ahead. The communication Internet is converging with a nascent energy Internet and logistics Internet to create a new technology platform that connects every thing and everyone. Billions of sensors are being attached to natu ral resources, production lines, the electricity grid, logistics networks, and recycling flows and implanted in homes, offices, stores, vehicles, and even human beings, feeding Big Data into a global neural network. People can connect to the network and use Big Data, analytics, and algorithms to accelerate efficiency, dramat ically increase productivity, and lower the marginal cost of produc ing and sharing a wide range of products and services to near zero, just like they now do with information goods. This plummeting of marginal costs is spawning a hybrid economy, part capitalist market and part Collaborative Commons: people are making and sharing their own information, entertainment, green energy, and 3D-printed products at near-zero marginal cost; they are sharing cars, homes, clothes, and other items via social media sites, rentals, redistribu tion clubs, and cooperatives at low or near-zero marginal cost; students are enrolling in free open online courses that operate at near-zero marginal cost; entrepreneurs are bypassing the banking establishment and using "crowdfunding" to finance startup busi nesses as well as creating alternative currencies in the fledgling sharing economy. In this new world, social capital is as important as financial capital, access trumps ownership, sustainability super sedes consumerism, cooperation ousts competition, and "exchange value" in the capitalist marketplace is increasingly replaced by "sharable value" on the Collaborative Commons. Capitalism will remain, but primarily as an aggregator of network services and solutions-a powerful niche player in the coming world beyond markets, where we are learning how to live together in an increas ingly interdependent global Collaborative Commons (a term that effectively sounds like a clumsy translation of"communism"). Here, however, we encounter one of the great antagonisms of our digital age: the very feature that sustains utopian hopes also THE SEEDS OF IMAG INATION 273 sustains new forms of alienation. The catch resides in the infini tesimal temporal gap between the pure synchronicity of the web (we appear to be all simultaneously connected, so that it doesn't matter where we are located in physical reality) and the minimal temporality that remains as a trace of the materiality of the web. This minimal gap is mobilized by high-frequency traders (HFTs) to earn billions, as Michael Lewis exposed in Flash Boys.6 Using fiberoptic cables that link superfast computers to brokers, HFTs intercept and buy orders, sell the shares back to the buyer at a higher price, and pocket the margin. Here, then, is how it works fr om the standpoint of a broker buying stocks: he sits in fr ont of a screen, sees an offer that he considers acceptable, presses the "YES" button, and the deal is instantly concluded, albeit at a mini mally higher price. What he doesn't know is that in the millisec onds between his pressing "YES" and the conclusion of the deal (which appeared to him instantly), the HFT's computer (operat ing on a special algorithm) has detected his "YES," bought itself the stock fo r the offeredprice, and then sold them back to him fo r a slightly higher price-the time gap is so small that the whole operation is unnoticed. This is why HFTs built, in secrecy, an 827-mile cable running through mountains and under rivers fr om Chicago to New Jersey: it reduces the journey of data from 17 to 13 milliseconds. There is also a transatlantic cable still under construction that will give a 5.2-millisecond advantage to those looking to profitfr om trade between New Yo rk and London. After the book was launched, several regulatory agencies took action: the Justice Department, the FBI, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority had been investigating HFT firms and exchanges fo r violations of insider trading and other Wall Street rules. Why such an outcry when receiving trading data a few milliseconds ahead of someone

6 I rely here on Andrew Ross's review of Flash Boys in the Guardian (May 16, 2014). 274 SLAVOJ :li:ZEK else-the raison d'etre of HFT-is technically legal? The reason is obvious: what HFTs are doing is proof that the stock market is rigged in favor of front-running traders while other players are screwed fo r having slower connections, so that the all-important image of the stock market as open and transparent is ruined. But there is another reason. The HFT scandal is only the latest evidence that the stock market's clubby insiders have always enjoyed an advantage fo r getting better and faster information. Yet the fiction of equal access is necessary to draw the punters into the casino and to ensure that the market escapes heavy regulation. Books like Matt Taibbi's The Divide attracted much less attention than Lewis's, although Taibbi fu lly details the record of bankers' malfeasance and extortion: predatory lenders, crooked collection agents, illegal fo reclosures, PPI rip-offs, and other swindles that are considered business as usual by the finance industry, so that, as Andrew Ross put it succinctly, the dupes in Lewis's story are the Wall Street brokers and hedge-fund managers who were outrun by flash boys; the victims in Taibbi's book are the rest of us. Focusing on HFTs thus brings fo rward a marginal phenomenon that appears as a specific distortion, thereby allowing us to adhere to the myth that the market is in itself a balanced and open mechanism. But there is yet a third, more fu ndamental, "metaphysical" even, reason. Franco Berardi locates the origin of today's uneasiness and impotence in the exploding speed of the functioning of the big Other (the symbolic substance of our lives) and the slowness of human reactivity (due to culture, corporeality, diseases, etc.): "The long-lasting neoliberal rule has eroded the cultural bases of social civilization, which was the progressive core of modernity. And this is irreversible. We have to face it."7 Are HFTs not an exemplary case of how our brains, our mental abilities, are no longer synchronous with the fu nctioning of the social-symbolic system? What happens in those milliseconds is simply beyond the

7 Franco Berardi, Af ter the Future, Oakland: AK Press, 2011, 177. THE SEEDS OF IMAG INATI ON 275 scope of our normal perception; agents don't know what goes on primarily not because of the immense complexity of the process, but because what gets enacted there is a kind of minimal self reflexivity: my own act (my reaction to the offer, my pressing "YES") is inscribed, taken into account, into what I perceive as the state of things (the price which I pay)-I decide (to buy), and my decision changes the price of what I buy. Furthermore, far fr om relying on some kind of mysterious synchronicity, the HFTs' operation mobilizes precisely the minimal gap between the virtual digital space and its material embodiment: our spontaneous illu sion, while we surf on the web, is that we are in the domain of pure synchronicity where the contact between all participants is direct. As the saying goes, when I communicate on the web, it doesn't matter where I am; my partner can sit in the next room or stand on some Himalayan peak. The HFTs' operation demonstrates that it does matter where I am; it is a kind of revenge of materialism against the spontaneous idealist illusion that pertains to the digital space. There is a kind of twisted emancipatory potential in what HFTs are doing: to quote Marx, what happens in their operation is a minimal "expropriation of the expropriators" (stock-market spec ulators, rich investors), who are getting their comeuppance perhaps this is why Flash Boys created such a fu ss. With HFTs, financial speculation reaches its meaningless pinnacle, bringing out the nonsense that sustains the entire edifice of financial specu lations-in this sense, one can say that HFTs are too bright fo r their own good. The German weekly magazine Der Sp iegel reported, among the greatest recorded stupidities and blunders of 1998, the case of a German robber who grabbed an old woman's purse while she was taking a photo of herself in the automatic photo booth at a railway station. Unfortunately fo r him, one of the usual four photos was taken at exactly the moment he leaned in to snatch the purse, so that his face and hand were clearly discernible on the photo, SLAVOJ ZLZEK

delivering to the police the direct proof of the crime plus who committed it. Don't we encounter something similar with HFTs? Do we not see there the direct proof of how the crime is committed? But there is an even deeper and properly uncanny dimension in what HFTs are doing. The way they demonstrate how markets are rigged points toward a more fundamental ontological deadlock in which (what we experience as) reality itselfis "rigged" in the sense that we don't perceive it "objectively," since our act is already inscribed into what we perceive. So it is as if HFTs do not simply operate in our reality, but intervene into the very mechanism of how we perceive/ constitute (what we experience as) reality: the most spontaneous link between action and reaction (I press the "YES" button to a deal, the deal is immediately confirmed) is already manipulated. And does quantum physics not entertain the same "riggedness" of reality itself? At its most daring, it seems to allow the momentarily suspension, "forgetting," of the knowledge of the real. Imagine that you have to take a flight on day X to pick up a fo rtune the next day, but do not have the money to buy the ticket; then you discover that the accounting system of the airline is such that if you wire the ticket payment within twenty-four hours of arrival at your destination, no one will ever know it was not paid prior to departure. In a homologous way,

the energy a particle has can wildly fluctuate so long as this fluctua tion is over a short enough time scale. So, just as the accounting system of the airline "allows" you to "borrow" the money fo r a plane ticket provided you pay it back quickly enough, quantum mechanics allows a particle to "borrow" energy so long as it can relinquish it within a time fr ame determined by Heisenberg's uncer tainty principle ... But quantum mechanics fo rces us to take the analogy one important step fu rther. Imagine someone who is a compulsive borrower and goes fr om friend to fr iend asking fo r money ...Bor row and return, borrow and return-over and over THE SEEDS OF IMAGINATION 277

again with unflagging intensity he takes in money only to give it back in short order ...a similar fr antic shifting back and fo rth of energy and momentum is occurring perpetually in the universe of

microscopic distance and time intervals. 8

This is how, even in an empty region of space, a particle emerges out of nothing, "borrowing" its energy from the fu ture and paying fo r it (with its annihilation) before the system notices this borrow ing. The whole network can function like this, in a rhythm of borrowing and annihilation, one borrowing fr om the other, displacing the debt onto the other, postponing the payment of the debt-it is really like the subparticle domain is playing Wall Street games with the fu tures. What this presupposes is a minimal gap between things in their immediate brute reality and the registra tion of this reality in some medium (of the big Other): one can cheat insofar as the second is in a delay with regard to the first. So, like with HFTs, reality itself (the way we perceive it) is "rigged" because of things taking place in the imperceptible interstices of time. The most important lesson of the latest technological progress and its social impact is therefore its radical ambiguity. During a debate with Jameson at the City University ofNew York (CUNY), Stanley Aronowitz claimed that the main reason of the decline of social utopia in the last decades is that, due to technological progress, we no longer need to resort to utopias, since in our real ity itself (almost) everything is now possible. However, this sense of unlimited possibilities is accompanied by a set of impossibilities: today the very idea of a radical social transformation appears to be an impossible dream-and the term "impossible" should make us stop and think. Impossibility and possibility are distributed in a strange way, both simultaneously exploding into an excess. On the one hand, in the domains of personal fr eedoms and scientific

8 Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe, New York: Norton, 1999, 116-9. SLAVOJ ZIZEK technology, the impossible is more and more possible (or so we are told): "Nothing is impossible." We can enjoy sex in all its perverse versions, entire archives of music, films, and TV series are availa ble for downloading, going to space is available to everyone (with money), there is the prospect of enhancing our physical and psychic abilities, of manipulating our basic properties through interventions into the genome, up to the tech-gnostic dream of achieving immortality by way of fu lly transforming our identity into software that can be downloaded fr om one hardware to another. On the other hand, especially in the domain of socio economic relations, our era perceives itself as the era of maturity in which, with the collapse of Communist states, humanity has abandoned the old millenarian utopian dreams and accepted the constraints of reality (read: the capitalist socioeconomic reality) with all its impossibilities: you cannot engage in large collective acts (which necessarily end in totalitarian terror), cling to the old welfare state (it makes you uncompetitive and leads to economic crisis), isolate yourself from the global market, etc. (In its ideo logical version, ecology also adds its own list of impossibilities, so-called threshold values-no more global warming than 2 degrees Celsius, etc.-based on "expert opinions. "9) The reason is that we live in the postpolitical era of the naturalization of econ omy: political decisions are as a rule presented as matters of pure economic necessity, so that when austerity measures are imposed, we are repeatedly told that this is simply what has to be done. In such postpolitical conditions, the exercise of power no longer primarily relies on censorship, but on unconstrained permissive ness, or, as Alain Badiou put it in thesis fo urteen of his "Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art":

Since it is sure of its ability to control the entire domain of the visi ble and the audible via the laws governing commercial circulation

9 I owe this idea to Alenka ZupanCic. THE SEEDS OF IMAGINATION 279

and democratic communication, Empire no longer censures anything. All art, and all thought, is ruined when we accept this permission to consume, to communicate and to enjoy. We should become pitiless censors of ourselves.10

Effectively, today, we seem to be at the opposite point of the ideol ogy of 1960s: the mottos of spontaneity, creative self-expression, etc., are taken over by the system, i.e., the old logic of the system reproducing itself through repressing and rigidly channeling the subject's spontaneous impetuses is left behind. Nonalienated spon taneity, self-expression, self-realization-they all directly serve the system, which is why pitiless self-censorship is a sine qua non of emancipatory politics. Especially in the domain of poetic art, this means that one should totally reject any attitude of self-expression, of displaying one 's innermost emotional turmoil, desires, dreams. True art has nothing whatsoever to do with disgusting emotional exhibitionism-insofar as the standard notion of "poetic spirit" is the ability to display one 's intimate turmoil, what Mayakovsky said about his turn fr om personal poetry to political propaganda in verses ("I had to step on the throat of my Muse") is the constitu tive gesture of a true poet. If there is a thing that provokes disgust in a true poet, it is the scene when a close friend opens up his heart, spilling out all the dirt of his inner life. The two lines fr om Kipling's "If"-"If you can wait and not be tired of waiting, if you can dream-and not make dreams your master"-seem quite an appropriate guide for those who want to remain faithful to communism. I see Jameson's "American Utopia" as a big step in this direction of censoring our dreams. His achieve ment in imagining the future outside the constraints of the existing order and in mercilessly breaking old taboos is (at least) triple. These taboos arise fr om the fact that every historical situation

10 Alain Badiou, "Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art," Lacanian In k 22, 2003, lacan.com. 280 SLAVOJ ZIZEK

contains its own unique utopian perspective, an immanent vision of what is wrong with it, an ideal representation of how, with some changes, the situation could be rendered much better. When the desire fo r a radical social change emerges, it is thus logical that it first endeavors to actualize this immanent utopian vision, which is why it has to end in a catastrophe. A voluptuous lady fr om Portugal once told me a wonderful anecdote: When her most recent lover had first seen her fully naked, he told her that, if she lost just one or two kilos, her body would be perfect. The truth was, of course, that had she lost the kilos, she would probably have looked more ordinary-the very element that seems to disturb perfection itself creates the illusion of the perfection it disturbs: if we take away the excessive element, we lose the perfection itself. It is at this level that we should also discern the mistake of Marx: he perceived how capitalism unleashed the breathtaking dynamics of self-enhancing productivity-see his fascinated descriptions of how, in capitalism, "all things solid melt into thin air," of how capitalism is the greatest revolutionizer in the entire history of humanity. On the other hand, he also clearly perceived how this capitalist dynamics is propelled by its own inner obstacle or antagonism-the ultimate limit of capitalism (of self-propelling capitalist productivity) is capital itself, that is, capi talism's incessant development and revolutionizing of its own material conditions, the mad dance of its unconditional spiral of productivity, is ultimately nothing but a desperate flight fo rward to escape its own debilitating inherent contradiction. Marx's funda mental mistake was to conclude, fr om these insights, that a new, higher social order (communism) is possible, an order that would not only maintain but even raise to a higher degree and effectively fu lly release the potential of the self-increasing spiral of produc tivity which, in capitalism, on account of its inherent obstacle (contradiction), is again and again thwarted by socially destruc tive economic crises. Which, then, are the taboos Jameson breaks? First, he dismisses not only the two main fo rms of the THE SEEDS OF IMAG INAT ION twentieth-century state socialism (the social democratic welfare state and the Stalinist party dictatorship) but also the very standard by which the radical left usually measures the failure of the first two, the libertarian vision of communism as association, multi tude, councils, anti-representationist direct democracy based on citizens' permanent engagement. This aspect is unacceptable fo r our ordinary democratic stance-no wonder that, in his debate with Jameson, Aronowitz desperately tried to reduce Jameson's utopian idea of universal conscription back to the anti representationist direct democracy where people (soldiers) organ ize themselves in councils, like they do in rebellious people 's armies. Such direct democracy is the extreme point of the politici zation of the entire society, while Jameson repeatedly emphasizes that his idea of universal conscription aims at the disappearance of the political dimension as such: all that remains in Jameson's utopian society is a militarily (i.e., nonpolitically) organized econ omy with no need fo r the permanent engagement of the people, and the immense, also nonpolitical, domain of cultural pleasures, fr om sex to art. (The truth we have to embrace is that, if we want to move out of representation toward direct democracy, this direct democracy has always to be supplemented with a non-representa tional higher power, say, of an "authoritarian" leader-in Venezuela, Chavez's leadership was the necessary obverse of his attempts to mobilize direct democracy in barrios.) For Toni Negri, the dream to be censored is his idea of the goal of emancipatory movements: the state in which the "dual power" shared between multitude and state organs is overcome and the self-organized multitude takes over completely the entire social reproduction and regulation. It is as if, in the recent Brazilian revolts and mass protests, Negri, a longtime sympathizer of the Lula government, got his own message back in its true fo rm-the government of Dilma Rousseff, Lula's successor, spectacularly failed to contain and integrate the protesting multitude. Although life of the poor and the middle classes improved considerably, it SLAVOJ ZTZEK was as if this improvement, and the very attempt of the govern ment to involve excluded minorities in a dialogue and empower them as autonomous political agents, backfired and strengthened acts of resistance-here is Hugo Albuquerque 's concise descrip tion of this process in Negri's terms:

The central issue is less that people objectively "improved their lives," as the economists, sociologists, and statisticians ... would have us believe, but rather that they fe el authorized to desire and, therefore, now desire without authorization. This class has no name because it does not need one; it is the very expression of many minorities-the poor, blacks, women, etc. that are sufficient in themselves, that go beyond labels and labeling and simply live. Without a name, this class is in some sense not orderable, since only a subject that has a name, and is thus subject to a regime, is capable of receiving orders.11

The future of this nameless class thus

depends on positively embracing its own internal plenitude and differences. Carnival, with its masks and its lawlessness, not the normalization of bureaucratic seriousness ...will allow a future fo r these lands ...no repressive fo rmula is capable of containing the intense investment of desire-at least not fo r long.12

There is undoubtedly a moment of truth in this description: it renders the reality of how the protesters experience their situation, and the despair of the state power that fails to contain protests through "rational" measures of material improvement. The dimen sion that prevents the protesting multitude from satisfactory,

11 Hugo Albuquerque, "Becoming-Brazil: The Savage Rise of the Class without Name," South Atlantic Quarterly 113-4, Fall 2014, 856-7. 12 Ibid., 861. THE SEEDS OF IMAGINATION nonantagomstlc collaboration with a "progressive" power is correctly characterized as desire-and to discern the problem, one should give to this term all its Lacanian weight. Desire is always a desire fo r its own nonsatisfaction: its ultimate aim is always to repro duce itself as desire, which is why its basic fo rmula is always some thing like "I demand this fr om you, but if you give it to me, I will reject it because this is not really that (what I really want)"-i.e., desire is a gap, a void, in the heart of every demand. Is not an exem plary case of this dialectic of demand and desire the case of a protest movement that demands from the government a measure X (say, to repeal a new law or to abolish a new tax), and if the government immediately concedes, protesters fe el frustrated and somehow cheated? But there is another paradox that defines the protesting multi tude: the quoted text that talks about the awakened desire in multi tudes also claims that they are "sufficientin themselves," that they "go beyond labels and labeling and simply live"-how can multi tudes be "sufficient in themselves" while engaged in continuous protesting, provoking the state power, bombarding it with demands?

Maybe, one should render problematic the very basic coordinates of this view, and turn around the opposition between fluid life of multitudes and the regulating oppressive power of the state appara tuses: what if the notion of power as the agency which regulates the de-territorialized flux of multitudes should be turned around? What if the basic units of social life, "sufficient in themselves," tend to "simply live" in their secluded groups, in their stable territorialized bases, and what if the de-territorializing agency is the state appara tus itself? The destabilizing logic of desire belongs to the fluid polit ical superstructure-it is this superstructure which is in excess with regard to the base ... No wonder, then, that, in an interview fr om January 20 15, Negri made two "general propositions," announcing a change in his position: The first one is that after 20 11 horizontality SLAVOJ ZIZEK

must be criticized and overcome, clearly and unambiguously ... Secondly, the situation is probably ripe enough to attempt once again that most political of passages: the seizure of power. We have understood the question of power fo r too long in an excessively negative manner.

The critique of political representation as a passivizing alienation (instead of allowing others to speak fo r them, people should directly organize themselves into associations) reaches here its limit. The idea to organize society in its entirety as a network of associations is a utopia that obfuscates a triple impossibility:13 ( 1) There are numerous cases in which representing (speaking fo r) others is a necessity-it is cynical to say that victims of mass violence from Auschwitz to Rwanda (and the mentally ill, chil dren, etc., not to mention the suffering animals) should organize themselves and speak fo r themselves. (2) When we effectivelyget a mass mobilization of hundreds of thousands of people organizing themselves horizontally (Tahrir Square, Gezi Square), we should never fo rget that they remain a minority and that the silent majority remains outside, unrepre sented. (This is why, in Egypt, this silent majority defeated the Tahrir Square crowd and elected the Muslim Brotherhood.) (3) Political engagement has a limited timespan: After a couple of weeks or, rarely, months, the majority disengages. The problem is to safeguard the results of the uprising at this moment, when things return to normal. No-there is nothing inherently "conservative" in being tired of the usual radical leftist demands fo r permanent mobilization and active participation, demands that fo llow the superego's logic-the more we obey them, the more we are guilty. The battle has to be won here, in the domain of citizens'

13 I rely here on Rowan Williams's "On Representation," presented at the colloquium The Actuality of the Theologico-Political, Birkbeck School of Law, London, May 24, 2014. THE SEEDS OF IMAG INATION passivity, when things return back to normal the morning after the ecstatic revolts. It is (relatively) easy to have a big ecstatic specta cle of sublime unity, but how will ordinary people feel the differ ence in their ordinary daily lives? No wonder conservatives like to see sublime explosions fr om time to time-they remind people that nothing can really change, that the day after, things return to normal. In the finalscene of Vfor Vendetta,thousands of unarmed Londoners wearing Guy Fawkes masks march toward Parliament; without orders, the military allows the crowd to pass the Parliament and the people take over. When Finch asks Evey fo r V's identity, she replies: "He was all of us." OK, a nice ecstatic moment, but I was ready to sell my mother into slavery to see Vfor Vendetta 2. What would have happened the day after the victory of the people? How would they (re)organize daily life? One should thus abandon ("deconstruct," even) the topic of the opposition between the "normal" run of things and the "state of exception" characterized by fidelity to an Event that disrupts the "normal" run of things. In the "normal" run of things, life just goes on, following its inertia; we are immersed in our daily cares and rituals and then something happens, and there is an evental Awakening, a secular version of a miracle (a social emancipatory explosion, a traumatic love encounter). If we opt fo r fidelity to this Event, our entire life changes; we are engaged in the "work of love" and endeavor to inscribe the Event into our reality. At some point, then, the evental sequence is exhausted and we return to the "normal" flow of things. But what if the true power of an Event should be measured precisely by its disappearance: by the change in "normal" life when the Event is erased in its result? Let's take a sociopolitical Event: what remains of it in its aftermath when its ecstatic energy is exhausted and things return to "normal"? How is this "normality" different? Jameson's second achievement concerns the problem of resent ment: He totally rejects the predominant optimist view according to which, in communism, envy will be left behind as a remainder 286 SLAVOJ ZIZEK of capitalist competition, to be replaced by solidary collaboration and pleasure in others' pleasures. Dismissing this myth, Jameson emphasizes that in communism, precisely insofar as it will be a more just society, envy and resentment will explode. He refers here to Lacan, whose thesis is that human desire is always desire of the Other in all the senses of that term: desire fo r the Other, desire to be desired by the Other, and, especially, desire fo r what the Other desires.14 This last makes envy, which includes resentment, both constitutive components of human desire, something Augustine knew well-recall the passage fr om his Confessions, often quoted by Lacan, the scene of a baby jealous of his brother sucking at the mother's breast: "I myself have seen and known an infant to be jealous though it could not speak. It became pale, and cast bitter looks on its fo ster-brother." The Soviet writer Yuri Olesha published in the late 1920 a short novel, Envy, which deserves to be reread from the later experience of the failure of Soviet communism. Its main character is Nikolai Kavalerov, who, shaped by the vanishing nineteeth century, when the imagination was king and art had no other purpose than being art, cannot but find repulsive the world in which he lives, the rapidly industrializing USSR. After getting booted out of a bar, he is found in the gutter by Andrei Babichev, a Soviet industrialist who is developing a sausage that will be inexpensive yet delicious and thus affordable fo r workers. Although Babichev offers Kavalerov a place to stay in his villa and finds him a little work to do (editing fo od-processing manuals), Kavalerov loathes Babichev for his vulgar utilitarianism. The second part shifts the fo cus onto the sexual comedy, but what makes the novel interesting is the ambiguity of its satire: should we read it as a satiric portrait of the old bourgeois individualists who cannot accommodate themselves to the new society (on account of this reading, the novel was popu lar in the USSR), or as the satiric condemnation of the new vulgar

14 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966, 689-98. THE SEEDS OF IMAG INATION utilitarian spirit? In other words, who envies whom? Does Kavalerov envy the social and sexual success of the new Soviet men, or does Babichev secretly envy Kavalerov's sensitive imagi nation, which is beyond the grasp of their narrow minds? Based on this insight, Jean-Pierre Dupuy proposes a convincing critique of John Rawls's theory of justice: in Rawls's model of a just society, social inequalities are tolerated only insofar as they also help those at the bottom of the social ladder, and insofar as they are not based on inherited hierarchies but on natural inequali ties, which are considered contingent, not merits. 15 Even the British Conservatives seem now to be prepared to endorse Rawls's notion of justice: in December 2005, David Cameron, the newly elected leader, signaled his intention of turning the Conservative Party into a defender of the underprivileged, declaring, "I think the test of all our policies should be: what does it do fo r the people who have the least, the people on the bottom rung of the ladder?" But what Rawls doesn't see is how such a society would create condi tions for an uncontrolled explosion of ressentiment: in it, I would know that my lower status is fu lly "justified" and would thus be deprived of the ploy of excusing my failure as the result of social injustice. Rawls thus proposes a terrifying model of a society in which hierarchy is directly legitimized in natural properties, thereby missing the simple lesson an anecdote about a Slovene peasant makes palpably clear. The peasant is given a choice by a good witch. She will either give him one cow and his neighbor two cows, or she 'll take one cow fr om him and two from his neighbor. The peasant immediately chooses the second option. Gore Vidal demonstrates the point succinctly: "It is not enough fo r me to win-the other must lose." The catch of envy/resentment is that it not only endorses the zero-sum game principle, where my

15 Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Avions-nous ouhlie le mal? Penser la politique ap res le 11 septembre, Paris: Bayard, 2002; John Rawls, A Th eory of justice, revised edition, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. 288 SLAVOJ ZIZEK victory equals the other's loss, it also implies a gap between the two, which is not the positive gap (we can all win with no losers at all), but a negative one. If I have to choose between my victory and my opponent's loss, I prefer the opponent's loss, even if it means also my own loss. It is as if my eventual gain from the oppo nent's loss functions as a kind of pathological element that stains the purity of my victory. Friedrich Hayek knew that it was much easier to accept inequal ities if one can claim that they result from an impersonal blind fo rce: The good thing about the "irrationality" of the market and success or failure in capitalism is that it allows me precisely to perceive my failure or success as "undeserved," contingent.16 Remember the old motif of the market as the modern version of an imponderable Fate. The fact that capitalism is not "just" is thus a key feature of what makes it acceptable to the majority. I can live with my failure much more easily if I know that it is not due to my inferior qualities, but to chance. What Nietzsche and Freud share is the idea that justice as equal ity is founded on envy-on the envy of the Other, who has what we do not have and enjoys it. The demand for justice is thus ulti mately the demand that the excessive enjoyment of the Other should be curtailed so that everyone's access to jouissance is equal. The necessary outcome of this demand, of course, is asceticism. Since it is not possible to impose equal jouissance,what is imposed instead to be equally shared is prohibition. Today, however, in our allegedly permissive society, this asceticism assumes the form of its opposite, a generalized superego injunction, the command "Enjoy!" We are all under the spell of this injunction. The outcome is that our enjoyment is more hindered than ever. Take the yuppie who combines narcissistic "self-fulfillment" with those utterly ascetic disciplines of jogging, eating health food, and so on.

16 Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. THE SEEDS OF IMAGINATI ON

Perhaps this is what Nietzsche had in mind with his notion of the Last Man, though it is only today that we can really discern his contours in the guise of the hedonistic asceticism of yuppies. Nietzsche wasn't simply urging life-assertion against asceticism: He was well aware that a kind of asceticism is the obverse of a decadent excessive sensuality. His criticism of Wagner's Parsifal, and more generally of late Romantic decadence, which oscillates between damp sensuality and obscure spiritualism, makes a very pertinent and valid point.17 How, then, should communism deal with this problem? Perhaps Kojin Karatani indicates one possible way with his apparently eccentric idea of combining elections with lottery in the procedure of determining who will rule us. This idea is more traditional than it may appear (he mentions ancient Greece)-paradoxically, it fulfills the same task as Hegel's theory of monarchy. Karatani takes a heroic risk in proposing a crazy-sounding definition of the differ ence between the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and the dictator ship of the proletariat: "If universal suffrage by secret ballot, namely, parliamentary democracy, is the dictatorship of the bour geoisie, the introduction of lottery should be deemed the dictator ship of the proletariat." 18 At this point, we have to confront the question of democracy. When Badiou claims that democracy is our fetish, this statement is to be taken literally, in the precise Freudian sense, not just in the vague sense that we elevate democracy into our untouchable abso lute: "Democracy" is the last thing we see before confronting the "lack" constitutive of the social field, the fact that "there is no class relationship," the trauma of social antagonism. It is as if, when confronted with the reality of domination and exploitation, of

17 Alenka Zupancic, The Shortest Shadow, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. 18 Kojin Karatani, Transcritique: On Kant and Marx, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003, 183. SLAVOJ ZIZEK brutal social struggles, we can always add: Yes, but we have democ racy, which gives us hope to resolve or at least regulate struggles, preventing their destructive explosion. Exemplary cases of democ racy as fetish are provided by bestsellers and Hollywood block busters, fr om All the President'sMe n to The PelicanBrie f,in which a couple of ordinary guys discover a scandal that reaches up to the president, who is fo rced to step down. Even if the corruption is shown to reach the very top, ideology resides in the upbeat final message of such works: What a great democratic country is ours, where a couple of ordinary guys like you and me can bring down the president, the mightiest man on earth! This is why the most inappropriate, stupid even, names for a new radical political movement that one can imagine are those that combine "socialism" and "democracy." It effectivelycombines the ultimate fetish of the existing world order with a term that blurs the key distinctions. Everyone can be a socialist today, up to Bill Gates-it sufficesto profess the need fo r some kind of harmonious unity of society, fo r the common good, fo r the care of the poor and downtrodden-or, as Otto Weininger put it succinctly more than a century ago, socialism is Aryan and communism is Jewish. An exemplary case of today's "socialism" is China, where the Communist Party is now engaged in an ideological campaign of self-legitimization which promotes three theses: (1) only Communist Party rule can guarantee successful capitalism; (2) only the rule of the atheist Communist Party can guarantee authen tic religious freedom; and, most surprising, (3) only continuing Communist Party rule can guarantee that China will be a society of Confucian conservative values (social harmony, patriotism, moral order). Instead of dismissing these claims as nonsensical paradoxes, we should discern their reasons: Without the stabiliz ing power of the Party, (1) capitalist development would explode into chaos of riots and protests, (2) religious factional struggles would disturb social stability, and (3) unbridled hedonist individu alism would corrode social harmony. The third point is crucial, THE SEEDS OF IMAGINATION since what lies in the background is the fear of the corroding influ ence of Western "universal values" of freedom, democracy, human rights, and hedonist individualism. The ultimate enemy is not capitalism as such but rootless Western culture, which invades China through the free flowof the Internet, and one has to fight it with Chinese patriotism-even religion should be "Sinicized" to ensure social stability. Xinjiang's Communist Party secretary, Zhang Chunxian, recently said that, while "hostile fo rces" are stepping up their infiltration, religions must work under socialism to serve economic development, social harmony, ethnic unity, and the unification of the country: "Only when one is a good citizen [can] one be a good believer."19 But even this "Sinicization" of religion is not enough: any reli gion, no matter how "Sinicized," is incompatible with member ship in the Communist Party. An article in the newsletter of the party's Central Commission fo r Discipline Inspection claims that since "the fo unding ideological principle that Communist Party members cannot be religious," party members don't enjoy any right to religious freedom: "Chinese citizens have the fr eedom of religious belief, but Communist Party members aren't the same as regular citizens; they are fighters in the vanguard fo r a communist consciousness."20 But how does this exclusion of believers from the Party help religious freedom? Marx's analysis of the political imbroglio of the French Revolution of 1848 comes to mind here. The ruling Party of Order was a coalition of the two royalist wings, the Bourbons and the Orleanists. The two parties were, by definition, unable to find a common denominator at the level of royalism, since one cannot be a royalist in general, only support a

19 Josh Rudolph, "Xinjiang Party Chief Calls fo r the 'Sinicization' of Religion," Ch ina Digital Times, June 15, 2015, http:/ /chinadigitaltimes. net/ 2015I 06/ xinjiang-official-sinicize-religion-to-combat -hostile- fo rces/. 20 Xin Lin and Hai Nan, "Warning over Religious Believers in Chinese Communist Party Ranks," trans. Luisetta Mudie, Radio Free Asia, May 25, 2015, rfa.org. SLAVOJ ZIZEK determinate royal house, so the only way fo r the two to unite was under the banner of the "anonymous kingdom of the Republic" in other words, the only way to be a royalist in general is to be a republican. 21 The same holds true for religion: one cannot be reli gious in general, one can only believe in some god(s) to the detri ment of others, and the failure of all the efforts to unite religions proves that the only way to be religious in general is under the banner of the "anonymous religion of atheism." Effectively, only an atheist regime can guarantee religious tolerance: the moment this neutral atheist fr ame disappears, factional struggle among different religions has to explode. This is why, although funda mentalist Islamists attack the godless West, the worst struggle goes on among them (ISIS focuses on killing Shi'a Muslims). There is, however, a much deeper fe ar at work in this exclusion of religious believers from membership in the Communist Party:

It would have been the best fo r the Chinese Communist Party if its members were not to believe in anything, not even in Communism, since numerous party members joined some of the churches (most of them the Protestant one) precisely because of their disappoint ment at how even the smallest trace of their Communist ideals disappeared from today's Chinese politics.22

In short, the biggest opposition to the Chinese Party leadership consists today precisely of truly convinced Communists, a group composed of old, mostly retired cadres who feel betrayed by the unbridled capitalist corruption, and of the proletarian losers of the "Chinese miracle": farmers who have lost their land, workers who have lost their jobs and wander around in search of means of

21 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Wo rks, Vol. 10, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1978, 95. 22 Zorana Bakovic, "Kako ho hog postal Kitajec?" Delo, June 17, 2015 (in Slovene). THE SEEDS OF IMAGINATION 293 survival, workers exploited at FoxConn and similar companies, all those who suffer injustices and humiliations and have no one to turn to. They often participate in mass protests wearing posters with Mao quotes, and one can imagine how potentially explosive such a combination of experienced cadres and the poor who have nothing to lose is. China is not a stable country with an authoritar ian regime guaranteeing harmony and thus keeping under control the capitalist dynamics. Every year, thousands, tens of thousands even, of chaotic rebellions of workers, farmers, minorities, etc., have to be squashed by the police and army. No wonder the official propaganda obsessively insists on the motif of harmonious soci ety: this very insistence bears witness to the opposite, to the threat of chaos and disorder. One should apply here the basic rule of Stalinist hermeneutics: since officialmedia do not openly report on troubles, the most reliable way to detect them is to search fo r the positive excesses in the state propaganda-the more harmony is celebrated, the more chaos and antagonisms there are likely to be. China is full of antagonisms and barely controlled instabilities that threaten to explode. It is only against this background that one can understand the religious politics of the Chinese Party: the fear of belief is effec tively the fear of the Communist "belief," the fear of those who remain faithful to the universal emancipatory message of Communism. Significantly, one looks in vain in the ongoing ideo logical campaign fo r any mention of this basic class antagonism which is exploding daily in workers' protests. There is no talk about the threat of "proletarian Communism"-all the fu ry is directed against the fo reign enemy:

Certain countries in the We st advertise their own values as "universal values," and claim that their interpretations of fr eedom, democracy, and human rights are the standard by which all others must be meas ured. They spare no expense when it comes to hawking their goods and peddling their wares to every corner of the planet, and stir up 294 SLAVOJ ZIZEK

"color revolutions" bothbefore and behind the curtain. Their goal is to infiltrate, break down, and overthrow other regimes. At home and abroad certain enemy fo rces make use of the term "universal values" to smear the Chinese Communist Party, socialism with Chinese char acteristics, and China's mainstream ideology. They scheme to use Western value systems to change China, with the goal of letting Chinese people renounce the Chinese Communist Party's leadership and socialism with Chinese characteristics, and allow China to once again become a colony of some developed capitalist country. 23

There are some true points in the quoted passage, but they func tion as particular truths covering up a global lie. It is of course true that one cannot and should not naively trust the "universal values" of freedom, democracy, and human rights promoted by Western powers, that their universality is a false one, hiding a specific ideological bias. However, if Western universal values are false, is it enough to oppose them with a particular way of life like the Confucian "China's mainstream ideology"? Don't we need a different universalism, a different project of universal emancipation? The ultimate irony here is that "socialism with Chinese characteristics" effectively means socialism with a market economy (w ith capitalist characteristics), i.e., socialism that fu lly integrates China into the global market. The universality of global capitalism is left intact, it is silently accepted as the only possible fr ame, and the project of Confucian harmony is mobi lized only in order to keep under control the antagonisms that come fr om global capitalist dynamics. All that remains of social ism are the Confucian "national colors," which should enable the Party to keep in check the antagonisms engendered by capitalist globalization. Such a socialism with national colors-a national socialism-is a socialism whose social horizon is the patriotic

23 Samuel Wade, "Unraveling China's Campaign Against Western Values," Ch ina Digital Times, March 5, 2015. THE SEEDS OF IMAG INATION 295 promotion of one 's own nation, and the immanent antagonisms generated by capitalist development are projected onto a fo reign enemy that poses a threat to our social harmony. What the Chinese Party aims at in its patriotic propaganda, what it calls "socialism with Chinese characteristics," is yet another version of "alternate modernity": capitalism without class struggle. If what goes on in China today can be characterized as "capital ist socialism," what, then, to do with fundamentalist movements like Boko Haram? From the perspective of a traditional communal life, women's education is a key moment of the devastating effect of Western modernization; it "liberates" women fr om family ties and trains them fo r becoming a part of the Third World's cheap labor fo rce. The struggle against women's education is thus a new form of what Marx and Engels, in The CommunistMa nifesto,called "reactionary (feudal) socialism," the rejection of the capitalist modernity on behalf of traditional fo rms of communal life. However, with a closer look, we can clearly see the limitation of this view: Whatever Boko Haram is, it does not practice a return to premodern communal life, since it is (in its organizational fo rm) an extremely modern organization that brutally imposes its univer sal model on traditional communal life in the territory it occupies. Boko Haram is run like a modern centralized terrorist/ revolution ary organization with leaders exerting total control, not as a tribal network where paternal chiefs meet to deliberate and decide on communal matters. It is thoroughly internationalist: It pursues a universal model, ignoring particular ways of life or particular ethnic identities. In short, Boko Haram is itself a fo rm of perverted modernization. It obliterates traditional communal fo rms of life even more brutally than Western capitalist modernization does. Back to Jameson, what this means is that we should reject not only all attempts of "alternate modernity" (which amount to a "capital ism without capitalism," without its destructive aspect), but also all attempts to rely on particular traditional life-worlds (local cultures) as potential "sites of resistance" against global capitalism. SLAVOJ 2TZEK

Jameson's third achievement is to reject the notion of commu nism as a higher unity of production and pleasure (or work and Eros), a society in which this most basic opposition, the zero-level of alienation, is overcome, so that work becomes pleasure, etc. It will be only in communism that the gap that separates production fr om pleasure (inclusive of culture, art, etc., up to social work and private life) will be thoroughly asserted-in contrast to capital ism, in which even the most intimate pleasures are commodified, made into a moment of capitalist self-reproduction. Do we not find a trace of this assertion of a gap already in early Bolshevism? From what we know about love among the Bolshevik revolution aries, something unique took place there, a new fo rm of love couple emerged: a couple living in a permanent emergency state, totally dedicated to the revolutionary cause, ready to sacrifice all personal sexual fulfillment to it, even ready to abandon and betray each other if revolution demanded it, but simultaneously totally dedicated to each other, enjoying rare moments together with extreme intensity. The lovers' passion was tolerated, even silently respected, but ignored in the public discourse as something of no concern to others. (There are traces of this even in what we know of Lenin's affairwith Inessa Armand.) Jameson posits as the basic fe ature of his utopian society a radi cal division between the domain of economy (production, goods and services) and the domain of cultural pleasures, endorsing universal conscription, i.e., the model of the army, as the organiza tional mode fo r the sphere of production. When he looks fo r the organizational model fo r the sphere of cultural pleasures, he of course cannot avoid the obvious candidate, the church or a similar religious organization, which imposes itself the moment we remember Freud's famous example of two artificial crowds, army - and church. Freud fails to clearly distinguish between the church model and the army model of the artificial crowd: while "church" stands fo r the hierarchic social order, which tries to maintain peace and balance by way of necessary compromises, "army" stands fo r TH E SEEDS OF IMAG INATION 297 an egalitarian collective of struggle, defined not by its internal hierarchy but by the opposition to its enemy, trying to destroy it radical emancipatory movements are always modeled on the army, not on the church, while millenarian churches are really structured like armies. Jameson engages in a complex argument against the church as a regulating mechanism of pleasures, preferring some kind of psychoanalytic institute that will educate people not to succumb to envy (by way of, among other things, teaching them to recognize pleasure in their very envy). But do these arguments really hold? Is the ultimate function of religion not precisely to regulate pleas ures? And can we really imagine a psychoanalytic institution to meet the requirements of a body destined to educate people in the art of pleasure? Furthermore, what disappears in Jameson's utopian vision-as he is well aware, and that's his point-is politics as such, the prop erly political process of making and enacting decisions that concern communal life. The clear-cut division between production and pleasure is here to guarantee this disappearance of the political, and the price Jameson pays for this disappearance is that he ignores basic questions like who will command the army and how, who will allocate jobs and how, how the psychoanalytic institutions regulating pleasures will be empowered, and so on. His dream is one of apolitical invention and regulation-no wonder he refers with great sympathy to apolitical neoliberal speculations about how to organize the economy efficiently, claiming that we should agree with everything there except the essential (capitalist private property). Jameson's vision is not so much utopia as fantasy proper, "having a cake and eating it": Its main premise is the clear divi sion between the kingdom of necessity and the kingdom of free dom, between production and culture/pleasure. Production is militarized and everyone is allocated a job, while outside this kingdom of necessity total freedom reigns supreme, with the SLAVOJ :ZI:ZEK wildest diversity of freaks organizing their weird pleasures. (Do we not have today almost the obverse of this fantasy: liberaliza tion of market economy, militarization of pleasures, in the guise of the duty to enjoy which demands discipline and training, conquest, and the battle of the sexes?) Can this be done? Does obscene pleasure not always-already contaminate obligatory disciplined activity, so that we find pleasure in it? And does militarization-discipline not always-already contaminate pleas ure-pleasure as a duty, done as a task? The basic enigma here is: why the army? Jameson's army is, of course, a "barred army," an army with no wars-wars and heroes are just celebrated in empty rituals (here we encounter pleasure in the kingdom of necessity). (And how would this army operate in an actual war, which is becoming more and more likely in today's multicentric world?) What instigated this role of the army in Jameson's utopia is clear: in the United States the army is the last big institution with fu ll free health care, free education, job secu rity, etc. But still: why the army, why not just a centrally organized economy that allocates jobs and guarantees fu ll employment? What surplus aspect is added by the army? It is the aspect of strug gle, the emergency state, fighting the enemy. When, at the afore mentioned debate at CUNY, Jameson was asked how he imagines the eventual implementation of his utopia of universal militariza tion, he evoked an emergency state caused by a large ecological catastrophe (to which we could also add a major financial melt down, large-scale unrest, etc.). One can mention here the tradition of catastrophe movies in which, as Jameson noticed, the threat to humanity creates a sense of solidarity and collaboration in which the old hierarchical and other differences become irrelevant. Does, however, this reply not rely on the sad prospect that only a great catastrophe can save the radical left? This surplus element is enig matic and crucial: what if the militarized fo rm is the very form in which the excluded politics and its obscene pleasures return in the pragmatic domain of production, of servicing the goods? THE SEEDS OF IMAGINATION 299

There is, however, a moment of truth in Jameson's rejection of politics: the ultimate horizon of emancipatory politics is what Badiou posits as the basic premise of the idea of communism, the "axiom of equality"-in stark contrast to Marx, fo r whom equality is

an exclusively political notion, and, as a political value, that it is a distinctively bourgeois value (often associated with the French revo lutionary slogan: Iiberti, igaliti, fraternite}. Far fr om being a value that can be used to thwart class oppression, Marx thinks the idea of equality is actually a vehicle fo r bourgeois class oppression, and something quite distinct from the communist goal of the abolition of classesY

Or, as Engels put it:

The idea of socialist society as the realm of equality is a one-sided French idea resting upon the old "liberty, equality, fr aternity"-an idea which was justified as stage of development in its own time and place but which, like all the one-sided ideas of the earlier socialist schools, should now be overcome, fo r it produces only confusion in people 's heads and more precise modes of presentation of the matter have been fo und. 25

Does this not hold even fo r today's French political theory, fr om Balibar's egaliberti to Badiou? Back to Marx, he unequivocally rejects what Allen Wood calls "egalitarian intuition"-egalitarian justice is unsatisfactory preciselybecause it applies an equal stand ard to unequal cases:

24 Allen Wood, "Karl Marx on Equality," n.d., http:/ /philosophy. as.nyu.edu/ docs/IO/ 19808/ Allen-Wood-Marx-on-Equality.pdf. 25 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Wo rks, Vol. 24, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1978, 73. 300 SLAVOJ ZIZEK

Right by its very nature can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable by an equal standard only insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken fr om one definite side only, fo r instance, in the

present case, are regarded onlyas workers and nothing else is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so fo rth. Thus with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal share in the social consumption fu nd, one will receive more than another. To avoid all these defects, right instead of being equal would have to be unequai.26

In claiming that it is not just to apply equal criteria to unequal people, Marx may appear to repeat the old conservative argument fo r the legitimization of hierarchy. However, there is a subtle distinction that has to be taken into account here: this argument is false when we are in a class society in which class oppression over determines inequality, but in a post-class society it is a legitimate one, since inequality is there independent of class hierarchy and oppression. This is why Marx proposes as the axiom of commu nism "to each according to his needs, fr om each according to his abilities." Wood points out that this maxim, although popularly associated with Marx, originated fr om Louis Blanc (who wrote, in 1851, "De chacun selon ses moyens, a chacun selon ses besoins") and can even be traced back to the New Testament: "And all that believed were together, and had all things common; and sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need" (Acts 2:44-5). So we have to qualify Badiou's thesis that "equality is the point of the impossible proper to capitalism"27-yes, but this impossible

26 Ibid., 86. 27 Alain Badiou, A Ia recherche du reelper du, Paris: Fayard, 2015, 55. TH E SEEDS OF IMAGINATION 301 point is immanent to the capitalist universe, it is its immanent contra diction: Capitalism advocates democratic equality, but the legal form of this equality is the very fo rm of inequality. In other words, equality, the immanent ideal-norm of capitalism, is necessarily undermined by the process of its actualization. For this reason, Marx did not demand "real equality"-his idea is not that equality as the real-impossible of capitalism should become possible; what he advocated was a move beyond the very horizon of equality. Furthermore, the "point of the impossible" of a certain field should not be elevated into a radical utopian Other. The great art of politics is to detect it locally, in a series of modest demands that are not simply impossible but appear as possible although they are de facto impossible. The situation is like the one in science-fiction stories where the hero opens the wrong door (or presses the wrong button) and all of a sudden the entire reality around him or her disintegrates. In the United States, universal health care is obvi ously such a point of the impossible; in Europe, it seems to be the cancellation of the Greek debt, fo r example. It is something you can (in principle) do but, de facto, cannot or should not do-you are free to choose it on condition you do not actuallychoose it. Therein resides the touchy point of democracy, of democratic elections: The result of a vote is sacred, the highest expression of popular sovereignty-but what if people vote "wrongly," demanding measures that pose a threat to the basic coordinates of the capitalist system? This is why the ideal that emerged fr om the European establishment's reaction to the threat of a Syriza victory in Greece was best rendered by a headline in the Financial Times: "Eurozone 's weakest link is the voters."28 In this ideal world, Europe gets rid of this "weakest link" and experts gain the power to directly impose necessary economic measures-if elections take place at all, their function is just to confirm the consensus of experts. (Incidentally,

28 Gideon Rachman, "Eurozone 's Weakest Link Is the Voters," Financial Times, December 12, 2014. 302 SLAVOJ Zi:ZEK the same feature characterized Communist regimes in Eastern Europe: an apparently modest demand, totally consistent with the official ideology and theexisting legal order-like the demand to repeal a certain law or replace some top politician-threw the nomenklatura into a much greater panic than direct calls for the overthrow of the system. Back in the early 1970s, the so-called "affair of the twenty-five members of Parliament" caused a scan dal in Slovenia. Twenty-five MPs proposed to replace the unpopu lar official Slovene candidate for a high federal post with another name, and although the entire action was totally legal and this other person was also a high-ranking member of the nomenklatura, the reaction was extremely brutal. All twenty-fiveMPs were fo rced to resign their posts. On account of necessary inconsistencies of global capitalism, this paradox of the "point of the impossible" goes up to self reference: the point of the impossible of global market could well be (and are) "free" market relations themselves. A couple of years ago, a CNN report on Mali described the reality of the interna tional "free market." The two pillars of Mali's economy are cotton in the south and cattle in the north, and both are in trouble because of the way Western powers violate the very rules they try to impose brutally onto the impoverished Third Wo rld nations. Mali produces cotton of top quality, but the problem is that the US government spends more money on the financial support of its cotton farmers than the entire state budget of Mali; no wonder Malians cannot compete with US cotton. In the north, the European Union is the culprit: Malian beef cannot compete with the heavily subsidized European milk and beef--European Union subsidizes every single cow with about 500 euros per year, more than the per capita gross national product in Mali. No wonder the minister of economy commented: We don't need your help or advice or lectures on the beneficial effects of abolishing excessive state regu lations, just, please, stick to your own rules about the fr ee market and our troubles will be basically over. THE SEEDS OF IMAG INATION

Advocates of capitalism often point out that, in spite of all the critical prophecies, capitalism is, overall, fr om a global perspec tive, not in crisis but progressing more than ever-and one cannot but agree with them. Capitalism thrives all around the world (more or less), from China to Africa, it is definitelynot in crisis-it is just the people caught in this explosive development that are in crisis. This tension between overall explosive development and local crises and misery (which fr om time to time vacillate the entire system) is part of capitalism's normal fu nctioning: capitalism renews itself through crises. Let's take the case of slavery. While capitalism legitimizes itself as the economic system that implies and fu rthers personal freedom (as a condition of market exchange), it generated slavery on its own, as a part of its own dynamics: although slavery was almost extinct at the end of the Middle Ages, it exploded in colonies from early modernity till the American Civil War. One can risk the hypothesis that today, with the new epoch of global capitalism, a new era of slavery is also arising. Although it is no longer a direct legal status of enslaved persons, slavery acquires a multitude of new fo rms: millions of immigrant workers in the Saudi peninsula (United Arab Emirates, Qatar, etc.) who are de facto deprived of elementary civil rights and freedoms; total control over millions of workers in Asian sweatshops often directly organized as concen tration camps; massive use of fo rced labor in the exploitation of natural resources in many central African states (Congo, etc.). But we don't have to look so far. On December 1, 2013, at least seven people died when a Chinese-owned clothing factory in an indus trial zone in the Italian town of Prato, ten kilometers fr om the center of Firenze, burned down, killing workers trapped in an improvised cardboard dormitory built onsite. The accident occurred in the Macrolotto industrial district of the town, known for its large number of garment factories. Riberto Pistonina, a local trade unionist, commented: "No one can say they are surprised at this because everyone has known for years that, in the SLAVOJ ZIZEK area between Florence and Prato, hundreds if not thousands of people are living and working in conditions of near-slavery."29 Only Prato has at least 15,000 legally registered immigrant work ers in a total population of under 200,000, with more than 4,000 Chinese-owned businesses. Thousands more Chinese immigrants are believed to be living in the city illegally, working up to sixteen hours per day fo r a network of wholesalers and workshops turning out cheap clothing. We thus do not have to look fo r the miserable life of new slaves far away in the suburbs of Shanghai (or Dubai or Qatar) and hypocritically criticize China-slavery can be right here, within our house: we just don't see it (or, rather, we pretend not to see it). This new de facto apartheid, this systematic explo sion of the number of different fo rms of de facto slavery, is not a deplorable accident but a structural necessity of today's global capitalism, so a consequent struggle against it can trigger a global change. There is what appears to be a strong counterargument against this strategy. Many times, the left has engaged in the battle against a particular fe ature of capitalism with the presupposition that this feature is crucial fo r the reproduction of the entire capitalist system, and has been proven wrong. Marx's support of the North in the American Civil War was based on the premise that cheap cotton produced by slaves in the South and then exported to England was crucial fo r the smooth functioning of the British capitalism, so that the abolition of slavery in the United States would bring crisis and class war into England. The premise of feminists and sexual-liberation partisans was that the patriarchal family is crucial fo r the reproduction and transmission of private property, so that the fall of patriarchal order would undermine the very roots of capitalist reproduction. In both cases, capitalism was able to integrate this change without any serious problems ...But

29 James MacKenzie, "At Least Seven Dead in Italian Textile Factory Fire," Reuters, December 1, 2013, reuters.com. THE SEEDS OF IMAGINATION does this counterargument really work? It certainly doesn't work today, when global capitalism not only cannot afford any widening of workers' rights but even has to abolish many traditional social democratic achievements and gains. This brings us back to Jameson's utopia of militarization. One can argue that, while the deadlocks of global capitalism are more and more palpable, all the imagined democratic-multitude grassroots changes "from below" are ultimately doomed to fail the only way to effectively break the vicious cycle of global capi talism is some kind of "militarization," which is another name fo r suspending the power of self-regulating economy. An obvious counterargument to this project of militarization is that even if we concede its need, we can conditionally endorse it only fo r a short period of transition: fu lly developed communism can in no way be imagined along these lines. However, things get very problematic here. In traditional Marxism, the predominant name fo r this tran sitional period was the "dictatorship of the proletariat," a notion which has always caused a lot of discontent. Etienne Balibar drew attention to the tendency in official Marxism to "multiply the 'intermediary stages' in order to resolve theoretical difficulties: stages between capitalism and communism, but also between imperialism and the passage to socialism"-such a "fetishism of the fo rmal number of these stages" is always symptomatic of a disavowed deadlock.30 What if, then, the way to subvert the logic of the "stages of development" is to perceive this logic itself as the sign that we are at a lower stage, since every imagining of higher stages (to be reached through the sacrifices and sufferings of the present lower stage) is distorted by the perspective of the lower stage? In a properly Hegelian way, we effectively reach thehigher stage not when we overcome the lower stage but when we realize that what we have to get rid of is the very idea that there is a higher

30 Etienne Balibar, Sur la dictature du proletariat, Paris: Maspero, 1976, 148, 147. SLAVOJ ZLZEK stage to fo llow what we are doing now and that the prospect of this higher stage can legitimize what we are doing now, in our lower stage. In short, the "lower stage" is all we have and all we wiltever get. Jameson goes far in this direction, breaking many taboos but it seems that one taboo remains: his anti-statal vision, his traditional Marxist idea of dismantling the state apparatus. Perhaps the army as the model fo r organizing social production is ultimately an ersatz state; perhaps this last taboo should also fall, and the big task that lies ahead is how to rethink the state. Let's return briefly to China. Another feature of how Chinese power functions today has to be noted: the state apparatus and legal system are redoubled by the Party institutions, which are literally illegal. As He Weifang, a law professor fr om Beijing, puts it succinctly:

As an organization, the Party sits outside, and above the law. It should have a legal identity, in other words, a person to sue, but it is not even registered as an organization. The Party exists outside the legal system altogether.31

It is as if, in Walter Benjamin's words, the state-founding violence remains present, embodied in an organization with an unclear legal status:

It would seem difficultto hide an organization as large as the Chinese Communist Party, but it cultivates its backstage role with care. The big party departments controlling personnel and the media keep a purposely low public profile. The party committees (known as "leading small groups") which guide and dictate policy to minis tries, which in turn have the job of executing them, work out of

31 Quoted in Richard McGregor, The Party, London: Allen Lane, 2010, 22. TH E SEEDS OF IMAGINATION

sight. The make-up of all these committees, and in many cases even their existence, is rarely referred to in the state-controlled media, let alone any discussion of how they arrive at decisionsY

The front stage is occupied by "the government and other state organs, which ostensibly behave much like they do in many coun tries": the Ministry of Finance proposes the budget, courts deliver verdicts, universities teach and deliver degrees, even priests lead ritualsY So, on the one hand, we have the legal system, govern ment, elected national assembly, judiciary, rule of law, etc. But as the officially used term, "party and state leadership," indicates, with its precise hierarchy of who comes first and who comes second-this state power structure is redoubled by the Party, which is omnipresent while remaining in the background. Is this redoubling not yet another case of diffraction, of the gap between the "two vacuums": the "false" summit of state power and the "true" summit of the Party? There are, of course, many states, some even formally democratic, in which a half-secret exclusive club or sect de facto controls the government; in apartheid South Africa, fo r example, it was the exclusive Boer Brotherhood. However, what makes the Chinese case unique is that this redou bling of power into public and hidden is itself institutionalized, done openly. All decisions on nominating people to key posts (party and state organs, but also top managers in large companies) are first made by a Party body, the Central Organization Department, whose large headquarters building in Beijing has no listed phone number and no sign indicating the tenant inside. Once the decision is made, legal organs (state assemblies, manager boards) are informed and go through the ritual of confirming it by a vote. The same double procedure-first in the Party, then in the state-is reproduced at

32 Ibid., 21. 33 Ibid., 14. SLAVOJ :Zi:ZEK all levels, up to basic economic policy decisions, which are first debated in the Party organs and, once the decision is reached, fo rmally enacted by government bodies. This brings us to the crucial idea of Jameson's utopia: his rehabilitation of the old Leninist idea of dual power. Is what we find in today's China not also an unexpected kind of dual power? Does the same not also hold fo r Stalinism? Perhaps it is time to take seriously Stalin's obsessive critique of "bureaucracy," and to appreciate in a new (Hegelian) way the necessary work done by the state bureaucracy.---- The standard characterization of Stalinist regimes as "bureaucratic socialism" is totally misleading and (self-)mystifying: it is the way the Stalinist regime itself perceives its problem, the cause of its failures and troubles-if there are not enough products in the stores, if authorities do not respond to people 's demands, etc., what is easier than to blame the "bureaucratic" attitude of indiffer ence and petty arrogance? No wonder that, fr om the late 1920s onward, Stalin was writing attacks on bureaucracy and bureau cratic attitudes. "Bureaucratism" was nothing but an effect of the functioning of Stalinist regimes, and the paradox is that it is the ultimate misnomer: what Stalinist regimes really lacked was precisely an efficient "bureaucracy": a depoliticized and compe tent administrative apparatus. In other words, the problem of Stalinism was not that it was too "statist," implying the fu ll identi fication of party and state, but, on the contrary, that party and state were fo rever kept at a distance. The reason was that Stalinism (and, in general, all communist attempts until now) was not really able to transform the basic fu nctioning of the state apparatus, so the only way to keep it under control was to supplement state power with "illegal" party power. The only way to break out of this deadlock ...here a new "seed of imagination" is desperately needed. An America Utopia: Epilogue

Fredric Jameson

Old clothes in the morning. Or work clothes, if you prefer, remem bering that blue jeans-their pastiche-is one of America's great est cultural exports. Perhaps the vision of everyone trudging to work in the morning is something of a nostalgia film, but after all the nostalgic or postmodern aesthetic is a new way of handling and aestheticizing necessity-nothing wrong with it. The consen sus is that no one likes work; the political question, then, seems to be pleasure and how work can be made pleasurable (in all the psychoanalytic senses). Fourier reflected deeply on it; Hegel preferred to call it Befriedigung, or satisfaction, a concept that had something to do, surely, with whether the work was yours or not: identification, choice, compulsion, working fo r yourself or work ing fo r the Spaniards and the Greeks (as the Germans like to put it), or better still (from a left standpoint) fo r those who don't work because they don't have to. The psychology runs like this: if every one has to work, then you don't feel quite so resentful. In his great East German Utopia, Rudolf Bahro insisted that Politburo members themselves do some manual labor every week, garbage collection for example, and perhaps do a little more than just to be 310 FREDRIC JAMESON

seen at it (he also thought that everyone, at whatever level, should be paid the same salary, which in a situation of universal labor is tantamount to a guaranteed minimum annual wage). This is the window dressing of necessity, whose true limits are to be found in the three or four hours a day we are told will be required of the planetary species. When you think of it that way, then the matter of agriculture inevitably raises its head, ugly or not: the stumbling block for every mode of production in history. Can peasants change jobs at will like everybody else? Will postcontemporary versions of the Green Revolution and agribusiness abolish agriculture as such? Or do you prefer to fantasize all this in terms of technology and robots? What about experts, job training, seniority, learning to labor, management, bad backs, natural endowment, innate skill, manual versus intellectual labor? Will the drill sergeant take a few hours to train his team for the rice paddies? Will job fatigue become the new version of post-traumatic stress disorder? In Almanac of the Dead, Leslie Marmon Silko has one of her characters observe that the real crime, the only true crime, is star vation. This is what utopia, and everything else, is all about. It is what socialism is all about, and I feel it may not have been clear enough in the original proposal that work, production, the base, is what the universal army is also all about-your three or fo ur hours in the morning. After that, change your clothes and, as they used to say in Rabelais's old monastic Utopia, do what you like. To be sure, the superstructure, culture, begins when we then have to confront this new problem, which has no natural solution. The organic species had one task, to reproduce itself; after that, nature has done with it and casts it aside like an old shoe. But not only is this nihilism, it explains the deeper rejection by modern philosophy of philosophy itself in its traditional fo rm of the desire fo r a system of truths and universals, now stigmatized as meta physics. But the critique of metaphysics was also philosophy, just as the critiques of the centered subject and of representation were. AN AMERICA UTOPIA: EPILOG UE

All these conceptual positions-to call them beliefs would be to revert to an older, now outmoded Enlightenment polemic-are in fact what it is urgent and alone meaningful to call ideologies. Pragmatism, vitalism, the philosophy of as-if, negative dialectics, the deconstructive renunciation of any truth position, non- or anti-philosophy, the "philosophy" oflanguage games as a "theory" of meaning, theory itself-all these posttraditional, postsystem atic, or post-Hegelian attempts to square the circle amount to little more than new philosophies in their own right, which is to say, so many ideologies. For ideology-one of those words so profoundly saturated with truth that everyone instinctively wants to avoid using it-is how you designate the situation-specificity of all thought and all positions (no matter how universally articulated). Ideology is what comes naturally to a species made up of individu als as we are: namely, that we can never reach "the universal," that everything we think is slanted and conditioned by the situation in which we are formed, fr om the existential and psychoanalytic all the way to class, nation, race, gender, and so fo rth. This is the deeper sense of "metaphysics" and indeed of "meaning" itself, and why all modern philosophies have been designed to avoid, to elude, and to denounce those seemingly affirmative positions and to find some suitably negative standpoint fr om which to project what we perhaps no longer dare to call truth. Marxism came the closest to squaring this circle, insofar as it included the very theory of ideology within its own system-which has, however, been as prone to philosophizing as all the others, as the quantity of Marxisms available today readily testifies. If the upshot of this "death of philosophy" is nihilism, why, then it only remains to point out that nihilism itself is also philosophy, just another philos ophy, an ideology, a metaphysic in its own right as well. "Meaning" is always ideological, in the sense in which Heidegger tells us that existence and death are always my own, always personal. In this situation, what one can say, as Giambattista Vico seems to have been one of the first to do, is that while nature is 312 FREDRIC JAMESON meaningless, history has a meaning; even if there is no meaning, the project and the fu ture produce it, on the individual as well as the collective basis. The great collective project has a meaning and it is that of utopia. But the problem of utopia, of collective mean ing, is to find an individual meaning. Having secured the reproduction of the species, the organism, then-whether you want to call it "naked life" or the Lacanian death drive, the problem of leisure time, or the nature of the Good-has to find something else to do with itself, and human history has developed a whole shopping mall fu ll of solutions, beginning with religion and art and running the gamut, not exclud ing asceticism, renunciation, self-mutilation, and a whole array of other pleasurable non- or anti-pleasures which it is the duty of every self-respecting utopia to take into account and to provide fo r. Presumably other people, the big Other, collectivity are always part of the scheme, a part that cannot be theorized or predicted in advance but that affects everyone. Heidegger's great ethic-let the Other be in its being!-has always seemed to me as detestable as it is comprehensible and even attractive, but impossible. So it is that utopian reflection-of which political reflection is necessarily a subset-however venal or otiose-finds itself drawn apart in two directions: the practical and technical details of the impossible thing and its plans fo r our subjectivities. I want to clar ify some of the fo rmer. Any discussion of the "base" today will probably have less to do with the construction of socialism than with the deconstruction of advanced capitalism. The conversion of the great monopolies into state-owned institutions-in this case, branches of the army-is a topic already widely discussed in the literature, and probably needs augmentation in three areas: information technology, the elimina tion of the profit-oriented dimensions of finance capitalism,and the hygienic surveillance of bureaucracy. But eliminating the intolera ble proliferation of commodities like toothpaste has a more direct impact on contemporary daily life, while the place fo r start-ups, AN AMERICA UTOPIA: EPILOG UE however chastened by treatment of American get-rich-quick fanta sies (and those of wealth in general), has to be preserved, not only fo r the practices of innovation but even more urgently fo r the investment of those tremendous youthful energies now currently engaged in everything from youth gangs and sport to computer games and business schools. The army was once a generally second class repository fo r a fraction of those energies: it now has to absorb and encourage them all in ways that are both materially productive and psychically exciting. The production of new desires, Marx called it, but he could not have had in mind the metastasis of commodity fe tishism, whose symptoms perplex visitors to drug stores and manipulators of television remotes alike. Peace Corps type altruisms are not fo r everybody, and certainly the Aristotelian ideal of the life of the mind today at best arouses little more than images of academic specialization. But it is important to eschew the puritanical solutions of the image cures proposed by Baudrillard or Sontag in their aesthetic "diets": Nothing good ever comes fr om repression, which can also, as Marcuse taught us, take the fo rm of desublimation. Let the superstructures take care of themselves (exchange, consumption), and insist only, but rigidly and sternly, on production and distribution. As fo r money-always the central obsession of utopian fantasy and for serious capitalist power strug gles-assign its interminable discussion to the philosophers and limit its use to a coinage so heavy and cumbersome it can only be deployed on special occasions. The topic is otherwise the symbolic substitute fo r the twin problems of the transfer of raw materials in the production process and of redistribution to ecologically poorer or impoverished regions (the central dilemma of federalism). Is population movement an infrastructural or a superstructural prob lem? No utopia will want everyone living on the beaches; nor will it probably want to require some system of officialpermits to move to the city. The problem of land tenure is the reason fo r the emer gence of political theory in the first place and, unfortunately, it may not have a conceptual solution, let alone a practical one. The grid of FREDRIC JAMESON army bases was the one offered here; let's hear some better ones! In any case, socialism will not be possible without an influx of just such new fantasy images, capable of overcoming those of present day late capitalism. Right now, only religion seems to be mining that vein with any diligence, and this is where psychoanalysis is supposed to help us out. It is clear that the drawing power of religion today does not lie in its impoverished promises of gratification, which are scarcely even wish fulfillments, but rather in its offer of discipline and repression. I was impressed, in the waning years of the 1980s, by the meritorious arguments of a non-Marxist, Robert Heilbroner, fo r the continuing validity of Marxism and its socialism; he gave up after 1989 like so many others, but in his final efforthe was only able to point to the attractions, fo r some, of the monastery and the religious commonwealth (which was also, to be sure, the fantasy origin of Thomas More 's own Utopia). Yet monastic discipline, Max Weber showed us, was also the original proving ground fo r the "spirit of capitalism"; the Jesuits certainly still hold many valu able lessons fo r those who speculate on the possibilities for the creation of some new kind of (communist) party. But surely we will not wish to return to religion as the only alternative. The church or the army, said Freud in his analysis of collectivities: in that case, the army by all means! (But remember that capitalism is not a form of collectivity!) These are not, however, names for "organic" groups (ethnici ties, peasants, class types, etc.) but rather fo r institutional organi zations (which, to be sure, tend to produce their own professional psychologies over time). Just as structural modifications in the religious orders can generate very different and sometimes more progressive psychologies, as with the worker priests, so also a universal army structure is likely to strengthen egalitarian tenden cies (and prejudices). What must be insisted on, however, is a radical separation between the systems of psychological analysis available to describe AN AM ERICA UTOPIA: EPILOG UE individuals and the theoretical proposals advanced fo r collectivi ties. Both are, to be sure, ideological, but systems of collective analysis are far more directly political and instrumental, inasmuch as all our named conceptions of groups and collectivities are inevi tably and necessarily flawed and slanted. Collectivities cannot be represented, and therefore it is desirable that we evoke them in the most neutral terms available. For one thing, any materialist approach to collectivities will wish to identify the structures social or biological-in which they are fo rmed. But even such materialist accounts will carry a political charge: thus a concept like "the people"-populist in fo rmation, as the cognate suggests carries a historical and class content that is finally not more theo retically acceptable than the more overtly reactionary notions of the crowd or the mob utilized by LeBon, Canetti, or even Freud himself. Rousseau's tour de force-the General Will-is a unique theoretical and philosophical attempt to name a collectivity while positing its physical impossibility as a social entity: all the rest is empirical sociology, while only the concept of class manages to include its own material determination within itself, at the price of also including history (the distinction between the class-in-itself and the class-for-itself). Meanwhile, the notion of "antagonism," as it has become popu lar since Laclau and Mou:ffe's pathbreaking book on "socialist strategy, " is unacceptable fo r the opposite reason, namely that it extends observations about individual psychology to collective societies at large. That all otherness is fundamentally conflict would be a healthy conviction to share; when applied to the social, however, it becomes an anti-utopian weapon designed to discour age revolutionary strategies or, at best, to limit radical politics to local issues. The popularity of a pop-psychological concept of this kind inclines one to believe that the excesses and failures of earlier revolutions have led their sympathizers not to understand and correct those defects, but rather to fleeideals of radical and systemic social change altogether: so it is that the psychic rewards of late FREDRIC JAMESON capitalism combine with historical images of revolutionary defeat to encourage the conviction that history is over and that nothing fu rther can be changed (except fo r natural disaster). As fo r specific named groups, it may be worthwhile to recapitu late my earlier "defense" of bureaucracy, inasmuch as, sociologi cally, the army itself no doubt falls under this category. To be sure, the most powerful and minimally fu nctionally bureaucratic struc tures today are not those associated with the hated state or govern ment but with the great corporations, where indeed they transcend the various state apparatuses on a worldwide scale. Much of the fo rce of contemporary anarchism derives from its unconscious assimilation of the monopoly of physical violence and repression by the state to the omnipresence of our bureaucratized societies. It is more satisfying to denounce totalitarianism than it is to complain about the officialswho turn you away on account of an incomplete fo rm or lack of one, who are surly and take their own kind of pleasure in enforcing impossible rules and regulations, who make no exceptions, who are not interested in listening to your problems or personal stories, who hang up the closed sign and cut off a lengthy queue of no longer very patient petitioners. It is less easy to arouse enthusiasm fo r the heroic moments of bureaucracy-the social workers, the parish priests, the teachers who established the first lay schools of the Republic in an era of clerical domination, the union organizers, the inspectors and whistleblowers, the canvassers for voting registration or party membership. Would the attack on bureaucracy be politically useful? The answer is dual and contradictory: Yes, it would, under socialism, inasmuch as one of the watchwords of socialism is the avoidance of the formation of groups (the founding fathers called them "factions") of this kind; no, under capitalism, inasmuch as bureau cracy is not a class and such attacks contribute little enough to any genuine class politics. I have already said that I prefer the word socialismto communism in discussions today, because it is more practical than the latter and AN AMERICA UTOPIA: EPILOG UE actually raises questions of party fo rmation as well as transitions, privatizations, nationalizations, finances, and the like, which the loftier regions of communism allow us to avoid. One assumes, however, that under socialism the issue of the seizure of power is by definitionalready achieved, and that therefore, in that (utopian?) situation, "class struggle" now applies more to the construction of socialism as such rather than to the defeat of the class enemy. The paper under discussion here is in fact a kind of shell game, in which, when you think you are talking about the armed fo rces, you are in reality talking about utopia, and when you think you are talking about revolution, you are deep into the future talking about the problems of socialism itself. It is as though Jonathan Swift were to complain that the horrors of the potato famine could have been avoided had people only taken his modest proposal to heart. Or perhaps we might prefer a somewhat modified Eisenhower cartoon, in which the military leader now observes, "Well, if they don't want to join the army, let them fo rm a political party instead!" Only there is no one there to add, "As I did!"

Index

Abe, Shinzo 169, 170, 171, 172 anti-historicism 72 absent cause 145 anti-humanism 72 addiction 89-90, 92 anti-military prejudices 77 Adorno, Theodor W. 48, 82-3, 93, Ill anti-radicalism 4 2 Agamben, Giorgio 241 anti-Semitism 160 agency 86, 120 anti-utopianism 32, 37, 41-2, 54--67, 77-9, aggression 75 201-2, 208, 210 agriculture 51, 310 cynicism as 189-95 Albuquerque, Hugo 282 Arab Spring 4, 13, 116, 143 alienation 168, 273-7, 282 Arendt, Hannah 237 Althusser, Louis 70, 71, 139, 145, 152, 187, Aristotle 24, 35, 50 235--6 armed uprising 5 American Medical Association 16 armies and army organization 19-20, 30, 37, 39, An American Utopia (Jameson) vii, 1-98, 151-2, 105, 109, 233-4 184--6 barred 298 impossibility 184-200, 205 and class 61-2 ontological effects 185-6 democratization 30-5 paralysis of collective imaginary 187-9 discipline 137, 205 reading 245 the draft 26-7, 28, 102, 104, 140 status 253 gendering 244 therapeutic maneuver 200-6 hierarchy 244 anarchism 155, 214, 316 jurisdiction 27 Anderson, Perry 56 National Guard 39-40 antagonism 65-6, 73, 76, 96, 109, 110-1 1, 117, nonmilitary function 62-4 208, 244, 315--16 political missions 26-7 social 135-6, 143 political purpose 27-8 anthropological transition 239 privatization 27-8 anti-capitalism 212-13 renationalization 28, 140, 145 anti-communism 42 role 313 anti-globalization movement 212 stereoptypes of 95 320 INDEX

and the utopian state 29-37 calculus of passions 81 volunteer 26 Callenbach, Ernest I, 17, 60, 76, 89 arms development 28 Cameron, David 287 arms storage 28 Canada 7, 78 Aronowitz, Stanley 277--8, 281 Canetti, Elias 111-16 art 36, 137, 279 capital 14, 85, 86, 150 association, fo rced 61 capitalism 32, 47, 90, 100, 125, 149-50, 288, 296 Augustus (Roman Emperor) 21 contradiction of !55 austerity 8, 50, 133, 148 critique of 49, 77-8 Ayache, Elie 193n deconstruction of 312-13 dynamics 191-3, 280 Badiou, Alain 156, 162-3, 196, 202-3, 278-9, and equality 300-1 289, 299, 300-1 global 152, 270, 295, 302-3 Bahro, Rudolf 44, 309-10 institutional debilitation 15 Balibar, Etienne 299, 305 late 21, 26, !88-9, 193n, 194, 195, 315-16 bankruptcy 99-100 Marx on 159-60 base, and superstructure 43-4, 82-3, 84-93, modes of exchange 165-6 105, 157-8, 159-61, 248, 312-13 monopoly !58 Baudrillard, Jean 2, 313 neoliberal 118-19 belief 125 patriarchal order 304-5 belief before belief 139 transition out of 3-4, 143, !53, 206 Bellamy, Edward 30, 31, 42, 64, 81 capitalist socialism 295 belonging 113, 114 carnival 87 Benedict, Ruth 72 Carver, Terrell 259 Benjamin, Walter 49, 56, 70-1, 199n, 306-7 centralization 82 Bensald, Daniel 121 Chesterton, G. K. 94-5 Berardi, Franco 254, 274 Chiapas 4, 143 Big Data 272 chiefs 5 Bill of Rights, the 27 Chile 221-2, 235 biopolitics 226-8 China 46, 225, 290-5, 303-4, 306-8 biopower, dual 228-9, 237 church, the 17-18, 296-7 biotechnology 269-70 citizen armies and soldiers 26, 85 Bisson, Terry 19, 231 civil revolution 180, 181, 182 Black Panthers, the 4, 117, 228-9, 237-8 civil society 21, 226 Blanc, Louis 300 civil war 220-1, 227 blood guilt of the present 144n class 61-2, 87, 160, 223 body, the 91 classless society 61, 62-6, 105, 114, 117 Bogdanov, Alexander 41 class promiscuity 141-2 Boko Haram 295 class struggle 65-6, 70, 160, 167, 317 Bolivia 221-2, 226 Clastres, Pierre 2, 5n Bolshevik political practice 215-16 climate change 7-8, 107 Le Bon, Gustave 67 coercion 118 boredom 40, 93, 100 Cold War 14, 41, 54, 70 bourgeois ideals 147 Collaborative Commons 272 bourgeoisie, dictatorship of the 218 collective action 207 Brazil 148-9, 164-5, 281-2 collective antagonism 135 Brecht, Bertolt 6, 50, 53, 157, 198-9 collective imaginary, paralysis of 187-9, 197, 210 Brechtian refunctioning 134-5, 140, 142 collective life 26 bureaucracy 7, 82, 87-8, 89, 103, 161-2, 166, collective phenomena 67 308, 316 collective subject, the 132 bureaucratic socialism 308 collective, the 23-4, 82 Burke, Edmund 49, 77-8 collectivity 106, 110, 111, 113, 115-16, 120, businessman, the 51-3 125-6, 135, 206, 233, 312, 314-15 Butler, Judith 139 comic utopianism 206-10 commodity fe tishism 313 INDEX 321 commodity, the 90-1, 134-5, 296 death drive 75--6, 177, 312 communes 30, 214-15 Debray, Regis 31 communism 42, 296, 316-17 debt 8, 144 and anarchism !55 decentralization 39 as capitalist fantasy 195 decision making 118-19 and envy 285-7 de-individuation 113, 114 failure of 162-3, 185n Delany, Samuel 37, 94-5 Firestone's 263-5 Deleuze, Gilles 24, 37 Marx's definition 163 democracy 2, 25, 32, 119 stages of development 305-6 as fe tish 289-90 as a universal party organization 164-8 horror of 116-17 Communist Parties, disillusionment with 2 mass 42 Communist Party 127--8, 162 representative 47 Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) true 95--6, 141 128--31 Derrida, Jacques 12 communist pathologies 168 desire 114-15, 283 communization theory 214 determinism 203--4 competence 47 dictatorship of the proletariat 32, 221, 305--6 computerization 46 dictatorships 25 Congo 192-3 difference 12, 75 conscientious objectors 28, I 09 disaster relief 29 conscription 26, 31, 35, 108, 108--9, 110, 115-16, discipline 30, 35, 59, 109, 137, 202, 205 118, 170, 234 discursive struggle 6, 8 American system 172-3 Disney, Wa lt 52 universal vii, 243, 281, 296 displacement, vacations of 78 constitutions, written 23 distribution, problem of 45-7 constructivism 70 Dolar, Mladen 139 consumerism 52, 89-92, 134-5, 139--40 domination, desire for 241 consumption 256-7, 262 double life, utopia of the 83 corruption 3, 9, 17, 148, 188, 290 draft, the 26, 28, 102, 104, 140 counterrevolutionary systems 27 dreams, censoring 279-80, 281 coups d'etat 28, 56 drug cartels 164-5 Crary, Jonathan 254-5 dual power 3-5, 9, 13, 21, 105, 205--6, 308 Creative destruction 50 ambiguity of 221 creativity 50-3, 134, 255--6, 262 in America 237-8 crime 10-1 1, 65, 94, 310 and the army 233--4 crisis 22, 230, 231 biopolitical element 226-8 crowd, the 111-17, 121, 206 biopower 228-9, 237 crowd crystals 113 candidates for 14-20, 231 crowd equality 113-14 classic 231-2 crowdfunding 272 debates and shifts 232-3 Cruz, Ted 269 dialectics of 142--4, 154--63 Cuba 19-20, 58 diffuseof dual power 232 culmral revolution 35-7, 47-50, 53, 62, 84, 89, elements of 229-3 1 136-7, 200--6, 238--9 interregnum and 219-21 culmre 18, 43--4, Ill, 132, 138, 207 Lenin and 217-18, 220, 221-2, 222-3, 230 culmre critique, the 72-3, 89-9 1, 119 Marxist positions on 155--63 culmre wars 25--6 Negri on 222-8, 235-6 cumulative equilibrium 98-9 permanent 235-7 currency system 45 as problem 222 cyborg, the 248 social law and 221-2 cynicism 189-95, 202 strucmres of 164--8 cynic subjectivity 191-3 system overlap and 39--40 as transition 217 Davis, Mike 227 Dupuy, Jean-Pierre 287 322 INDEX

Durkheim, Emil 67, 72 Firestone, Shulamith 261, 263-5 dystopia 2, 54, 93, 269-70 flash mobs 96, 116-17 foco theory 31 East Germany 309-10 food production 29, 207 ecological damage 21-2 fo rced association 207 economic growth I 09 Ford, Henry 52, 53 Ecotopia 4 fo reign policy 25, 57, 58 Edison, Thomas 50, 52, 53 Fortini, Franco 239 education 29, 35-7, 207 Foucault, Michel 2, 33, 66, 70, 215n efficiency 48-50, 104, 133--4,251 Fourier, Charles 38, 40--1, 79-84, 87, 110-11, Efremov, Ivan, Andromeda 64 309 ego ideal 122-3, 125--6, 126 France 7, 30-1 Eisenhower, D. 19 freedom 32-3, 44, 55, 81, 84, 86, 93, 94, 105, Elliott, Robert C. 87 136, 138, 203--4,243, 249-50, 277-8, 297-8 Elster, Jon 255 free market, the 5, 6, 47, 133, 193, 302-3 emancipation 149, 203 French Revolution 4, 26, 30, 40, 180 employment 45--6, 102, 109, 207, 248 Freud, Sigmund 54, 73, 74, 76, 110, 115, 123, enclave, the 4, 225 203--4, 288, 314 Engels, F. 40--1, 80, 239, 247, 295, 299-300 "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" 176 enjoyment (jouissance) 38, 64, 73, 74, 75--6, 79, The Ego and the Jd 177 88--9, 93, 110, I 13, 142, 288--9 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego Enlightenment, the 18, 48, 73, 311 67, 75 entitlement attitudes 262 Th e Interpretation of Dreams 177 entrepreneurialism 51-3 on masochism 178 enunciation, impossibility of 196--200 therapeutic practice 76 envy 38, 74, 75, 88--9, 93, 110, Ill, 115--16, 240, and war 175-9 285--9 frontier anarcho-communism 238 epistemological impossibility 185--6, 197 fu ndamentalist movements 295 equality 113-14, 299-301 ethical socialism !53 Gandhi, Mohandas K. 70 ethics 167-8 Garreau, Joel 38 Europe 15 General Will, the 315 evil 192 genius 52-3, 134 exchange, modes of !56, 165--6 Gide, Andre 95 existential anxiety 83 global capitalism !52, 271, 295, 302 existentialism 70, 96, 137-8 global economy 10 I extremist gradualism 224 global elite, the 123-4 globalization 10--11, 14, 14-15, 22, 119 failed states 25 global warming I 07 fa lse consciousness 191 Gombrowicz, Witold 76 fa scism 48 Goodwin, Barbara 46-7, 85 fe ar Gornick, Vivian 131 of the collective 233 governing institution 81-2 embracing 201-2, 208 governmentality 4 of the Other 66 governmental powers 21, 234 of utopia 254--67, 260 Gramsci, A. 3, 14, 22, 56, 188, 216, 218 federalism 14-15, 38--9, 168, 237, 313 gray market, the 10 failure of 78--9 Greece 212-13, 229, 301 problem of 88--9 Gregg, Melissa 251 utopian nonsolution 79-84 group combinations 79-84, 87, 88, 214-15 feminism 55, 263-5 group psychology II 0 finance, nationalization of 7-8 guerrilla warfare 31, 225--6 financial crisis, 2008 123--4 financial deregulation I Habermas, Jiirgen 200 financialization 50 habitus 83 INDEX

Hall, Stuart 6 individuation 112 Hamas 4, 117 industrial exploitation, ecological damage Haraway, Donna 248 21-2 Hardt, Michael 13, 116, 225-8 industrious creativity 255-6 Harik, Judith Palmer 227 inequality 17, 45, 85, 103, 107 hatreds 88-9 information technology 9, 15, 46, 50-1, 84 Hayek, Friedrich 42, 288 innovation 51-3 Hazan, Eric 229 instant, the, politics of 13 health care 19-20, 28-9, 207 institutionalization 92, 223 Hegel, G.W.F. 12, 21, 85, 95, 147, 150, 179, 192, institutions 126 210, 268, 289, 309 instrumentalization, critique of 48-9 Heidegger, Martin 46, 311, 312 Internet of Things 271 Heilbroner, Robert 314 Internet, the I, 15, 126 He We ifang 306 interregnum 219-21 Hezbollah 226, 227 inventors 51, 52-3 hierarchy 30, 244 invisible hand, the 98-9 high-frequency traders (HFTs) 273-7 Iran 226 historical development, iron laws 127 Iraq war 27 historical impossibility 184-5 Islam 5, 227 historicism 70-2 Islamic State 164, 291 history 13, 145, 213-14, 312 end of 71, 188-9 Jade Helm 15 Hitchcock, Alfred 267 military exercises, conspiracy theory Hobbes, Thomas 66, 76, 179-80 268-9 Hobsbawm, Eric 78 James, Henry 267 Horkheimer, Max 48, 66 Jameson, Fredric housing 207 achievement 279-80, 285-6, 296 human desire 210 alternate modernity 295 humanism 70 approach 138 human nature 42, 49-50, 60, 93-4, 179-80, Archaeologies of the Future !90 194-5 biological individuation 112 human rights 149 and conscription 115-16 Huntington, Samuel 25, 32, 42 and consumerism 134-5 Huxley, Aldous 57 cultural revolution 136-7 dialectical contradiction 142-4 ideal ego, the 122-3, 125-6, and dual power 23 1 idealism 69 and employment 132 identity 75, 199 ethical model 167-8 ideology 53, 69, 73, 149, 152, 156, 160, 187, on history 145 311 impossible present 144-5 imagination 268, 270 interest in utopia 244-8 immaterial labor 51 on late capitalism 193n imperialism 109, 158-9 methodology 183-4, 196-7, 200, 205 impossibility 205, 277-8 military democracy 122 to discriminate 189-95 military model 105-6, 107-8, 108-1 1, of enunciation 196-200 117-19, 128, 140-2, 157, 166, 230, 243-4, epistemological 185-6 296-8, 305-8 historical 184-5 on the new 133 imaginary 189 and Other space 125-6, 128 ontological effects 185-6 and the party 117-18 paralysis of collective imaginary 187-9 Th e Political Unconscious 187 practical consequences 186-7 presentation of proposal 208-9 Indebted Man, the 144 proposal status 189-90, 197-8 individual, the 75, 82 proviso Ill individuality and individualism 11, 110, 112 The Seeds of Time 188-9, 260 INDEX

and the state !57, 161-2 leftists viii "Totality as Conspiracy" 187 left, the, structural impossibility of 147-5 1 transgression 159 legal profession 16 utopia 136, 137, 233-42 legitimacy 66 utopian vision 151-4, 296-308 Le Guin, Ursula 45, 46, 65 James, William 21, 60, 85 leisure time 256-7, 262 Japan 169-82 Leninism 222 anti-rearmament movement 174 Lenin, V. I. 4, 35, 41, 68, 105, 142, 143, !57, 219, Article 9 violations 17 4 240 Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) 171, and dual power 217-18, 220, 221-2, 222-3, 174-5 230 National Police Reserve 174 on imperialism 158-9 pacifism 169-70 State and Revolution !5, 64-5, 136, 217 pro-Article 9 camp 172, 175, 178 Levi-Strauss, Claude 2 Self-Defense Forces 169, 170--1 Lewis, Michael 273-5 Japanese constitution liberal parties 6 amendment 171, 174-5 Linhart, Robert 240 American imposition of 173-4, 175, 178-9 literature 88 Article l 173 localism 11, 107 Article 9 169-70, 170--2, 173-5, 182 Locke, John 85 Article 9 as superego 177-8 lottery 46-7, 85, 289 Jaures, Jean 30--1, 57 Lucas, Rob 252, 254 Jobs, Steve 52 Lukacs, Georg 268 Johnson, Lyndon B. 27, 60 joint-stock companies 248 MacArthur, Douglas 173 judicial system 16 Machiavelli, Nicolo 22, 30, 67 justice 104, llO, 114, 287, 299-300 Mafia, the lO-l l male aggressivity 60 Kafka, Franz 153 Mali 302 Kamo 229 Mannheim, Karl !53 Kantian perpetual peace 179-80 manpower 29 Kant, Immanuel 18, 23-4, 55, 64, 170, 179-80, Mao Zedong 31 267 Marcuse, Herbert 44, 313 Karatani, Kojin !56, 165-7, 289 marginal cost, near-zero 271-2 Kautsky, Karl 205 market, the 98-9 Kellogg-Briand Pact, 1928 170, 173, 179 Marxism 23, 42-3, 72, 119, 152-3, 305, 311, King, Martin Luther 70 314 kinship system 82 critique ofinstrumentalization 48-9 Klein, Ezra 269 positions on dual power 155--63 knowledge 35--6,90--l psychological concepts 68 Korean War 174 Marx, Karl 26, 40, 49, 51, 73-4, 76, 84, 87, 121, Kosovo 164 !49, 181, 248, 256, 280, 313 Krisis-Group, "Manifesto against Labor" 251-2 analysis ofcommodities 12 Kristof, Agota 168 Cap ital 27, !55, !58, !59 Kurz, Robert 25 The Communist Manifesto 167, 247, 295 definition of communism 163 labor 32, 50-1, 55, 83-4, 138 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 Lacan, Jacques 73-7, 79-80, 92, 122, 168, 286 261-3, 264-5 Laclau, Ernesto 65-6, 96 on equality 299-301 language 6, 62-3, 201-2, 205 Grundrisse 160 laws 94-5, 100--l, 193 Th e Po verty of Philosophy !50-! Lazzarato, Maurizio 144 spiritualization of the commodity 51, 91 League of Nations 179, 181 "The Critique ofthe Gotha Program" 113, Lebanon 226 217 Lefebvre, Henri 216 theological niceties 90 INDEX 325

and utopias 245 Nordhoff, Charles 238 Mason, Paul 123--4 normalizing risks 164 mass democracy 42 mass mobilization 284 Occupy 4, 13, 42, 116, 143 mass uprisings 116-17 old, the 133, 134 mechanization 27 Olesha, Yuri 286-7 medical profession 16-17 ontological effects 185-6, 197 \ferkel, Angela 203 Orwell, George, 1984 54 metaphysics 69, 310-11 Other, the 25, 73-5, 76-7, 91-2, 139, 312 militarism 33-5 fe ar of 66, 79, 208 militarization 35, 96, 137, 239, 244, 297-8, 298, space of 121-3, 125--6, 128 305-8 Owen, Robert 40, 41 military democracy 30-5, 39, 40, 85, 102--4, 118, 208, 24 3--4 pacifists 28 military fears 55-6 Palestine 13 military organization 30-5, 37 Paris Commune, the 15, 121, 218, 225 military research 58 party 121-2, 126-7, 166-8 military system, breadth of 28-9 party fo rm, the 106-7, 117-18, 168 modernity 25, 36, 216, 295 party organizing 128-32, 164-8 money 17, 85, 86, 98, 103, 134-5, 313 Pascal, Blais 56 money economy 98-9 patriarchy 55, 304-5 monopoly capitalism 158 pedagogical production 136-8 \lore. Thomas 38, 79, 81, 314 people 's war 225 \Iorris. William, Ne ws From Nowhere 64 permanent interregnum 226 motivational system 207-8 permanent revolution 40 \touffe. Chantal 65--6 philosopher-kings 16, 46, 82 multiplicity, the 18 philosophy 20, 150--1, 310-11 \liintzer, Thomas 153 Pistonina, Riberto 303--4 Platform for those Affected by Mortgages NAFTA 5 (PAH) 237 Napoleon 31, 50, 85, 180 Plato 16, 29, 82 National Guard 39--40 Platonov, Andrei 144n nationalism 141 pleasure principle, the 176 nationalization 6, 28 Podemos 149 national unity I 09 police 56, 57, 82 Nazism 42 political engagement 284-5 necessity 44, 84, 94, I 05 political fo rms 120-1 needs 262-3 political parties 5-8 negative, the, power of 88 political programs 3-8 Negri, Antonio 13, 24, 116, 189, 220-1, 222-8, political theory 20-6, 221, 313-14 235--6, 281-2 political thinking 22 neoliberal capitalism 118-19 politics, withering away of 103, 297 neoliberalism 133, 148, 149, 149-50, 151, 173, Polybius 22 212-13 population, the I 06 new, the 133, 134 populism, collapse of 42 Nietzsche, Friedrich 69, 288-9 postfamilial communism 263-5 Nixon, Richard 27 postmodernity II, 13, 22, 36, 193n nonsatisfaction 281-3 postwork speculation 260-5 nonviolence 70 Poulantzas, Nicos 232, 233, 234 nonwork 249, 253--60 power 2, 223 consumption model 256-7, 257-8 asymmetry 218 fa ilure of imagination of 258-60 balance of 236 industrious creativity model 255-6, 257-8 consolidating 219 passivity model 253-5, 257-8 constituent 13 sleep 254-5 constitutional 24 INDEX

destituent 241 Rifkin, Jeremy 271 disorganizing 241 rituals 138-9 networks 4 Roache, Rebecca 269-70 political 241 Robespierre, Maximilien 17-18 proletarian 224 Robinson, Kim Stanley 81 state 218 La Rochefoucauld, Fran<;:ois de 67, 80 practical impossibility 186-7 Roman Empire, the 21 Prato, Italy 303--4 Romanticism 48-9 prices 98-9 Rossanda, Rossana 236n producers 240 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 2, 22, 23, 180 production Rousseff, Dilma 28 1-2 collectivity 135 Russian Revolutions 41, 180-1,217-18, 221-2, militarization 297-8 231-2 mode of 43-7 pedagogical 136-8 Sahlins, Marshall 2 relations of 159--60 Samuel, Raphael 128-31 productivity 44-5, 109 Sartre, Jean-Paul 61, 69, 70, 74, 83, 96, 137-8, profit 99 235-6 programmatism 214 Saviano, Roberto 1 0 progress 49, 71, 206 scandal, the 19ln proletariat, the 160, 167, 218, 224 Schumpeter, Joel 50 dictatorship of 32, 22 1, 305--6 science 36 Proudhon, Pierre Joseph 86, 150 Second International, the 182 psychoanalysis 53, 67-77,93, 168, 196, 203--4, self-defense 57-8 314-15 self-determination 122 structural 138--40, 143 self-indulgence 81, 136 psychoanalytic cure !96-7 self-knowledge 54, 136 Psychoanalytic Placement Bureau 81-2, 106, sexual-liberation 304 I ll, 118, 126, 132, 209, 240 Shaw, George Bernard 6-7 psychology 67-77, 315-16 Silko, Leslie Marmon 310 psychotherapy 201 Sinicization 290-5 slavery 23, 303--4 quantum physics 276-7 sleep 254-5 S!oterdijk, Peter 73 racism 148 Smith, Adam 194n radical change 198-9 Smith, Jason E. 106 rationalism 204 social antagonism 135-6, 143, 244 Rawls, John 287 social change 73 realism !87n social citizenship 212 reality, rigged 276 social democracy 3, 6-7, 212 reason 24 socialism 3, 35, 39, 42, 28 1, 314, 316-17 reformism 187, 205, 21 1-13 bureaucratic 308 refunctioning 134-5, 140, 141, 142 fa ilure of 162-3 regimentation 59 return to 148 Reich, Robert 45 Sinicization 290-5 religion 17-18, 290-5, 314 socialist legality 136 representation 23, 161, 284, 284-5 socialist realism 36, 87-8, 137 representative democracy 4 7 social justice II0, 287 representative go vernment 28, 105, 108, 118, social promiscuity 141-2 132 social structure 20-1 resentment 285-9 socioeconomic structure 20-1 revolution 3, 13, 14, 40, 60, 170, 187-8, 205 solidarity 168 revolutionary order 40 Solidarity for All 229, 237 revolutionary practice 215-16 Southwood, Ivor 254 revolutionary violence 156-7 sovereignty 4, 106 INDEX 327

Soviet councils !57 training 58-9 Soviets of Wo rkers' and Soldiers' Deputies transference 121-2 2!7-18 transition 213-17, 246-7 Soviet Union 45 Trotsky, Leon 31-5, 40, 55, 1!8, 205, 219, collapse of 15, 78, 127-8 221-2, 233, 239, 240-l Communist Party status 162 Tupinamba, Gabriel 164-5 dual power 166, 217-18 Tu rnbull, Colin 2 interregnum 219-21 war communism 3!-5 unemployment 9-10, !32 space !2-!3, 216 unionization 7, 9-10 American 14--15 United Nations 166, 173, 179, 182 Spain 78 United States of America specialization 47 candidates for dual power 15-18, 18-20 species-being 62 Communists experience !31 Spinoza, Baruch 81, 96 conscription system 172-3 spiritualization 51, 9! dual power in 237-8 Stakhanovism 36, 137 fe deralism 237 Stalinism 308 revolutionary tradition 237-8 standardization 12 sickness 86 statecraft 22 space 14-!5 state, the 25, 38, 39, 119 universal army 20, 102---4, 105, 107-8, 140-l, dismantleing I 05 206-7, 230, 233 and dual power 230 challenges of idea 247-8 power 218 class promiscuity 141-2 sidestepping 107-8 conscription 110, 243 transformation of 167 decision making 118-19 types of 22 and employment 132 withering away of II, 20, 43, !57, 161-2, fo rced association 141-2 163, 306 lack of political purpose 109 structural analysis 90-l machinic population 122 structural psychoanalysis !38-40, 143 organization I 09 subjectivity 120 and political division 117 subject, the 122-5, 127-8, 132 role 108-9, !!9-20, 125-6 sublimation 91 and true democracy 141 superego, the 75, 122-3, !25-6, 126-7, 177-8, unmanageable 206n 288-9 universal militarization 96, 137, 298 superstructure, and base 43-4, 82-3, 84--93, Universal, the 94-5 105, 157-8, !59-6 1, 248, 312-!3 unlawful, the 56-7 Syria 226 UN system 166 Syriza 148, 149, 229, 301 uprising, the 4-5 US Constitution 27, 37, 39, 109, 141, 237, 241 Taibbi, Matt 274 utopia tax and taxation I 03 decline of 277-8 technology 44-5, 46, 49 expectations conception !53 temporal manipulation 269-70 fe ar of 54-67, 260 Thatcher, Margaret 6, 7, 8 history and development 40-l theological niceties 90-l Jameson's interest in 244--8 Third International, the 182 Marx and 245 Third Worldism 2 negative 152-3, 215 Thomas Aquinas 74 origins ofterm 40-l Thomas, Peter D. 107 production !, !94-5, !98 thought, and politics 163 proposal status !89-90 time 13, 269-70 unimaginable !90-l totalitarianism 41-2, 58, 78, !53 utopian construction 37 traditionalism 78 utopianism 40-3, 20ln INDEX

comic 206-1 0 Weber, Henri 233 necessity of 151-4 Weber, Max 48, 56, 224 task of 245-6 Weininger, Otto 290 utopianizing 133 We st, Cornel 18 utopian thinking 1-2 Wilde, Oscar 59 Utopian universalist 143-4 Williams, Raymond 39 will to power 69 vacations, of displacement 78 Winstanley, Gerrard 57, 58 value 55, 86-7, 96, 97, 98 Wood, Allen 299 value fo rm, the 149-50, 162 work 83, 309-10 Venezuela 226, 236, 28 1 mere 249 Vfor Vendetta(film) 285 and nonwork 249-50, 258-60 Vico, Giambattista 311-12 role of 24&-53 Vidal, Gore 287 workers, status 167 Vietnam War 27, 60, 172-3, 174 work ethic 59, 250-2, 258-9 violence 55-7, 60, 61, 194, 199, 218 working hours 44 crime 65 work/life balance 250 monopoly on 28, 316 world government 10-1 1 relations of 218-19 World War I 30 state-founding 306-7 World War II 21, 59, 85-6, 181 Virno, Paolo 51 Yoshida, Shigeru 174 wage labor 32 youth movements 42-3 wages 15, 84-5, 93, 99, 103, 24&-9 Yugoslavia 15, 78, 161-2 Walmart 209n, 248 Wa lzer, Michael 255 Zapatistas 164 warfare 57-8, 60, 61, 85-6, 173, 230 Zavaleta Mercado, Rene 221-2, 229, 230, 232, Freud and 175-9 241 guerrilla 225-6 Zimmerwald 31 War Games 60, 76 Zizek, Slavoj 94-5, 122, 124-5, 139, 150, !51, war neurosis 176-9 152, 156-7, 162, 201, 202, 203 wealth 17, 103 Zupancic, Alenka 19ln, 209-10 weapons 57